Scottish Marathon Championships

With the Scottish Championships this weekend at Pitreavie I have been looking back at Scottish Championships of not so long ago. When guys like Phil Dolan, Doug Gemmell, Ian Leggett and company were running marathons, the Scottish Marathon Championship was held at the the national championships. You would turn up at Meadowbank, collect your number, see the medic for a check up, take your drinks (if you had any) to the appropriate report room and leave them there and warm up. Once you had warmed up you would go to the report room and be taken through the tunnel to the centre of the arena and head for the start line. Once the gun went, you did a lap and a half of Meadowbank and out on to the road. After the main part of the race was over it was back into the arena for a final lap plus to the finishing line. There was a bit of atmosphere about it, there was a presentation of medals inside the arena where it could be seen by the spectators and since the best home runners and some from outwith Scotland were running, times were usually good.

Contrast this with the current situation where the event is held anywhere that someone other than Svottish athletics is organising a race. The runners line up with whoever else has entered the race and are mainly 'another attraction' for the race sponsors. Medals are awarded away from the main championships and there is no real sense that it is a real Scottish Championship.

OK, so there are no athletes like Don McGregor (over 20 marathons inside 2:20 including a couple after the age of 40), Fergus Murray, Allister Hutton or Jim Graham (all sub 2:10 runners) or even Steve Laing, Jim Dingwall, Doug Gunstone or any of a dozen or so who were all under 2:20. But maybe ther might be if there was a proper championship in Scotland. Let's look at figures: last year only one Scot ran inside 2:30 for the event inside Scotland, the year before there were two! Dreadful!!! Ten years ago there were two inside 2:20 and a further five inside 2:30 (two were inside Scotland), in 1978 there were five inside 2:20 and a further fifteen inside 2:30. In 1966 Alistair Wood ran 2:13.

Were the championships to be included in the Scottish Track and Field Championships it might make a difference - at worst it would only highlight the dire state of road running in Scotland.