Some things change but others don't

As I have been going through my collection of the old A5 style Athletics Weekly from 1978 to 1987 prior to disposal, I have been scanning quite a few pages and enjoying the build up to the very first London Marathon in 1981.

Many things have changed and although it was remarkable what Chris Brasher and his team achieved by pulling off such an event, when most correspondents were complaining about it, the organisation described above seems quite basic compared to what we have now.

I stayed at the Strand Palace Hotel for five years for the event a decade ago and had no idea that it had been the first marathon headquarters hosting the registration and exhibition.

With just a few months notice the organisers received more than 40,000 applications to run and accepted around 7,500.

And the first 500 ran 2.43.25 or faster.

Now there are hundreds of thousands of runners around the world who would like to run, the entry system favours faster runners and yet only 275 ran 2.43.25 or faster in 2013.

I know lots of people who have run 3, 4, 5 or even 6 hours for the London Marathon and every finisher should be proud of their performance.

But it is quite sad that there are so few club athletes in the 20 to 35 year ago group putting themselves on the line for a marathon. Running standards peaked in the first few years after the London Marathon started.

It is ironic, therefore, that the Isle of Man Veteran Athletes' Club Spring Handicap, which for so long was closed to the older generation of athlete, has been revived by opening the entry to all.

For a while, if you watched the event, you would see the same athletes running a little slower ever year, but last night it was a 23 year old who set the fastest time.

Alan Corlett (below) pushed himself to the absolute limits in running just over 33 minutes for 10km on a cool, windy evening.

The fastest Manx runner in the very first London Marathon was Steve Kelly and all these years later he is still the fastest from these shores to finish. One of Steve's great virtues was that no matter how hard he was trying or fast he was running he always had time to recognise what other athletes were doing and gave them some encouragement as he lapped them!

A generation and more later we have more old runners in the London Marathon and we have young runners in a veterans race but some things don't change. It is a pleasure to witness the way that Alan was encouraging all the other athletes last night.

The sport thrives on having people of all abilities and standards but the best part is the mutual respect for one another.

Athletics in a different size

A few years ago one of my elderly relatives was in trouble with his wife for talking too much about the past. "Well when you are our age there is not much point about talking about the future" was his reply.

Its a challenge I always face myself, and have probably talked about previously in this space. When do you look forwards and when do you look back?

As a sports administrator I felt I always looked to the future writing three year and five year plans as I did with the Parish Walk in 1990. When I became Chairman of the IOMAA around that time I said we had to have targets for the year or how else could we report our achievements at the end of the period.

As a website publisher, I think it is known that I value publicising events six months ahead not six days or even six weeks beforehand. I face a constant struggle to make information available about future events.

I love looking back too but I think that should be the fun side of it. It should not be an end in itself to constantly look back.

Its almost two weeks ago since my mother-in-law passed away. Marie did not want to make an announcement on Facebook but it has subsequently been mentioned. We are facing the challenge of sorting through all of the things that have been saved for years and it has renewed my determination not to leave the planet with tons of my possessions that others have to deal with.

Alongside clearing my mother-in-laws belongings I am clearing more of mine. Last night I brought my collection of very old Athletics Weekly down from the attic to have a final flick through before disposal.

Its going to be harder than I imagined. I took a 1978 copy to the little room before I went for my run this morning and read about a great 2 mile race between Henry Rono and Steve Ovett.

An odd distance but a great race. An odd size magazine, it was printed in A5 size, but a great magazine.

The road to a thriving sport

I took the photo of this road nearly five years ago when visiting Newcastle. On a Sunday morning each autumn it is impossible to see the road for it is covered by tens of thousands of runners lining up for the Great North Run.

The Great North Run was the brainchild of Brendan Foster. In the 70s he was one of my heroes. Often he would win big races and, although he sometimes didn't, you never felt he would let you down. It was a different era of course, but I loved the way he had the guts to take a race by the scruff of the neck even if, by trying to win, his gamble would cost him dearly.

I've watched so many 800 and 1500 metre races in recent years when I wish some of the the Brits would gamble a bit more.

When Big Bren took to the commentary box I was less of a fan. For several years he seemed to talk about nobody other than Steve Cram and his range of commentary was less than any other in the history of sports commentary. It is like having a commentator in football who only speaks when the goalkeeper has the ball and passes over the microphone as soon as the goalie passes the ball.

And then there is the conflict of interest. He is never going to criticise the Great Run series in which he has such an interest. Would a horse racing commentator be allowed to commentate on an event he organised?

But every now and again Brendan Foster hits a chord that is in tune with my thinking. Last week he was quoted in the Sunday Times after he contacted the paper, he said it was the first time he had ever done so, to protest at the way athletics is being judged purely by the number of medals we win at the Olympics.

Comparisons were made with the GDR. For those too young to remember the GDR, it wasn't Brendan's venture into Ireland (Great Dublin Run) it was the ironically named German Democratic Republic - there is possibly more democracy in Zimbabwe than there was in East Germany.

In the GDR, if you were good at a particular sport you had to do it whether you liked it or not. Not only did you get the top coaches but the top pharmacists were on hand too!

Given the choice, I would probably rather watch the best 10 marathon runners in the world run the London Marathon on a short circuit so that I could see them time and time again at the expense of the masses. But even if 10 runners beat 2.05 the run would create less interest than if 40,000 completed the course. And sport would be the loser if those 40,000 people sat in the pub watching the action getting fat intead of competing.

I'll still get the odd dig in where I see standards are falling. For example, the winning performance in the 20 miles on Sunday would only have achieved 9th place in 1996.

But Mr Foster is right. The sport is thriving in so many ways away from the Olympics. As was noted in the obituaries for Christopher Chattaway recently, it was only the eccentrics that went running in the old days. And they were only young people too.

Going back to the days when Brendan Foster was putting Tyneside on the map a fellow Geordie was criticising the changing face of Newcastle. Alan Hull, the most prolific of the songwriters in Lindisfarne wrote many songs about alleged corruption and how houses were being knocked down to build motorways.

Alan Hull, who is long deceased, would not have imagined the motorways being covered in runners. Lindisfarne had an album called Nicely out of Tune. But for once, Brendan Foster is in tune with me. The sport is thriving; we would like more high achievers but let's recognise what Brendan Foster and others like him have achieved with the mass participation events.

Alan Hull's Fog on the Tyne has gone and if he were around now he might be writing "We can run together" instead of "We can swing together.".