Great South Run

World class athletics came to Portsmouth on Sunday. Seeing a world champion setting a new course record is quite a moving experience, not as much for the simple anorak feeling of being there to see it but to see just how perfect it looks, the way that whereas for most of us running 10 miles on tarmac would be impossible, joint-breaking or at best a difficult plod, to see World Cross Country Champion, Joseph Ebuya, and Grace Momyani, both Kenya, skim, float across or disdain the ground they cover is entirely 'something else'.

And neither do I have anything but the ultimate respect for those hours behind the planet's most gifted whippets who have trained to take part, find great fulfilment in the achievement and either wave to cameras and crowds in the knowledge that they have only a mile to go and will finish or those who show their suffering, take a bit of a walk or stop to stretch a hurting muscle. Hats off to the dizzying passage of faces and running styles, the courage, determination and unwilling body shapes that they force into the pursuit of achievement. My only suggestion to any but the best of them would be that it is actually easier and more enjoyable on a bicycle.

I found Freya Murray, second in the women's event, as impressive as any on the purely racist grounds that someone from Scotland could be good enough to come second to Grace's prototype distance running. But the main reason I was so impressed is that, somewhat unbelievably now, I did once do something similar as a teenager, up and down the exciting gradients of Churchdown Hill outside Gloucester when I was the merest of schoolboys. It was tough, it was spleen, it was fight and it was guts but, quite honestly, it was a soft option compared to having to play rugby union against the first team of a school that frankly fancied itself at the game and officially outlawed proper football, at which, 15 years old, I was a maverick talent. It was like being an oil painter working among jobbing painters and decorators, or at least I can say that now.

But I'm not sure if the Cross Country title that Ebuya won involved him in climbing over gates or slipping through ankle-deep mud on twilight Gloucestershire November evenings. From what I've seen of Cross Country on the telly, it looks as if they do a few laps of a field with a bit of a slope in it.

So, having not run an inch since finishing a creditable, I thought, 10th, in the Fairford Festival Fun Run of 1995, I was deeply engaged and profoundly impressed by seeing not only what top class distance running now looks like in the flesh- it looks like sprinting for 10 miles- but also how many unsuitable people are giving it a go and getting a huge thrill out of it. You only have to get down to the first of the club runners to begin to see less than perfect running actions but then you notice that they are doing the 10 miles in a time not much longer than I'd take to do it on wheels now. Ebuya running v. Green on bike would nowadays be a bet worth considering although, in my defence, I did do 10 miles in 26.31 in 1995 and so I'd have been hanging around waiting for him at the end in those days when I was fit.

But, absolutely tremendous, all of it, and all of them, and not least the little warm-up sideshow I saw when police jumped on a pickpocket and eventually carted him off. We might find Shakespeare's invention of Autolycus to be a tricksy figure of guile and wonderment in an old play but we don't like crimimal no-marks ruining a lovely Sunday like this when everybody else is having a nice time.