Right at the start of the twenty first century I started work on an idea that had been germinating for five or six years before that. I had come into the sport in 1957 when the people, races, venues, rules and regulations were pretty well identical with the pre-war version of the sport of athletics. The scene began to change in the 1990’s and by the turn of the century had changed almost beyond recognition. It was more professional in that it had more money available for its government, in that whereas it had previously been run by six governing bodies (SAAA, SWAAA, SCCU, SWCCU, SSAA and SHRA) it was now run by one. There were other plus points but there were also several downsides – for instance many would say that the link with the clubs was reduced, that different definitions of success were introduced and so on. It also saw the end of the many international fixtures such as the Small Nations matches, the Scotland v Ireland, or Scotland v Iceland and so on. The last international featuring all events was held at Grangemouth in 1991.
I had seen the changes being made and although they came gradually – eg one small meeting would disappear from the fixture lists, and then another, and then there would be the dropping of athletics events from a local meeting that continued without them until eventually the fixture list was much smaller than it had been. The idea that I had was to document that era from 1945 through to 1995 to tell people what it had been. For road runners at least it had been a genuine golden age in my estimation with the national marathon championship (currently being held outwith Scotland) being run from the national track and field championships and the wonderful Edinburgh to Glasgow Relay being one of the two real highlights of the winter season. In fact if we realise that not only have we lost that race, we no longer have a Scottish team in the world cross-country championship then we can see how much the winter season has been bereft of it two real pinnacles.
I enjoyed running and I enjoyed coaching. To be a successful coach you need luck and a patron I think. My first break as a coach came from Alex Naylor when I was appointed Staff Coach for 5000/10000 and that gave me a lot of information and insight into the sport, training and coaching. The second patron was Frank Horwill who called me the Scotch Wizard, gave me lots of encouragement and was always willing to come to Scotland.
The British Milers Club helped me a lot – I gained from association with people like Frank Horwill, Peter Coe, Jimmy Hedley and others. I was also honoured to be the club president in 1986/7 – with Peter Coe as vice-president! We had the two day annual agm and conference in Glasgow in 1986 with all the above present plus Sean Kyle from Ireland, Malcolm Brown and Alex Naylor. The Grand Prix was held in Glasgow in 1999, 2000, 2001 before others took over. The whole thing was a tremendous honour.
Hence the reasoning. Once the site – and its sister site www.anentscottishrunning.com – was up and running we had lots of assistance from other interested parties and their contribution is recognised at the Who Are We? page on this site. Thanks for all the help and all the assistance.