Evergreen Sonia has legs to go distance

LockerRoom: We'd thieve her time if we could, we'd snatch away the dwindling years if she let us.

LockerRoom: We'd thieve her time if we could, we'd snatch away the dwindling years if she let us.

She's as obdurate as ever though and if she bothers to cock an ear to half-catch the nostrums of the Olé olé olé brigade, she just keeps moving and laughing.

Should have quit while she was ahead, they say, like it's them that's dealing the cards across the table. Should have gone out at the top, now she's just a busted flush. Shame to see her slowing down, losing it. Does nobody say it to her? Pack-it-in-girl!

The Sports Council took away her grant for a while. We waited to see would Sonia pop up in some other incarnation, TV pundit, tight-lipped coach. Everyone forgets that for Sonia to be still is to be stagnant. She should give it up, they tell her, not knowing that since she was a girl she never saw a race she didn't like, never saw a day that wasn't made for running.

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If you're blessed, you'll find one thing in life that you love to do. Sonia O'Sullivan found it a long time ago when she won a lollipop for coming first in a race at a party. She fell into addiction quickly.

We never quite understood, those of us who tuned in to cheer and bawl. Even when she was coltish and golden back in Barcelona, cantering away from the field with a tactical innocence but a thoroughbred's stride, we assumed she was in it for what we were in it for. Good times and glory. Gold medals and open-top buses. G'wan ya girl, ya.

And there was plenty of that stuff, sunshine days and shattered records. And plenty of the other, bruised skies and hard tears. But she wasn't there for the end. She was there for the means.

Just the running. Running as fast as she could make herself go. Every time.

Last weekend her team won the Perpetual Walking Stick Award in the Green Belt Relay. She ran the first leg and the last leg and, same old Sonia, broke the women's stage record for the last leg.

She went so fast in fact that she broke the men's record as well.

They were bemused because she was running as a veteran, in a team (called The Millennium Group, one presumes because of the aggregate of their ages) the average age of which was 50 years. To qualify as a veteran for the Green Belt Relay you have to be 40 years old if you're a man, 35 years old if you're a woman. They might want to rethink that last part this week.

The Green Belt Relay? At first it sounds like the last place you'd find Sonia O'Sullivan. Last place over the 20 stages gets you a toilet seat. Many of the runners compete dressed as nuns or as Superman. Sonia says she's getting used to a world of running where when people ask if you need a drink they don't mean something isotonic.

The Green Belt Relay is meaty though - 212 miles around London's green necklace, a course stitched on to roads, towpaths, bridleways and fields.

The race passes not once but twice past Sonia's house on the Thames. They'd been keeping an eye out for the postman to deliver the 35-birthday cards. She'd been keeping an eye out every May on the lunatics thundering past her house. When they knocked on her door this year, she was ready to come out to play.

So on a Saturday morning not too long after she finished eighth in the London marathon and before she's even decided on an autumn marathon (somewhere fast perhaps - she itches to get whittling that PB) she was to be found limbering up in the sedate confines of Hampton Court.

The 12.8 miles to Staines in Middlesex is the sort of jaunt she likes to take before the serious work starts. The Green Belt Relay is run by (in all senses) The Stragglers Running Club. The ethos which leads a club to eschew names like Harriers or Flyers in favour of Stragglers, informs the race. And veterans are to be treated with respect and deference. One such, Michael Hutchings, was completing his 10th Green Belt Relay last weekend. He's 87.

Mr Hutchings is 87 and obviously still in love with his running. That's just a fling, a tawdry one-night stand compared to the passion Sonia brings to her running though.

When she finished third on the Saturday morning before last (all men, young men, flying home around her), you could have guessed that she wouldn't be down in the Dog and Duck that evening drinking lager tops in celebration. Sonia is the type of woman who will still be competitive when she's 87.

No surprise then on Sunday when she destroyed the field in the closing stage from Walton Bridge to The Hawkers Centre in Ham. Not enough to win the overall race for the Millie Group but sufficient to romp away with the Perpetual Walking Stick.

The Stragglers Club need to stop her now but they don't sound as if they have the energy. Sonia will be eyeing other stage records for the next 12 months. The cheery old greybeards who totter around the veterans' section won't have a minute's peace until they've won five GBRs in a row.

A couple of nights after the relay, while some of the paler vets were still feeling the soreness in their legs, she went back for her first serious track session of the season. Time to graft a little summer speed on to the winter's work.

In her head she knows that probably Beijing is beyond her, but that's not the point. She's always run against herself, always done it because it's the sweetest feeling in the world. And if she's running well enough and there's a chance of slipping into a marathon or a 10,000 in China, well why not? You don't have to get out of bed to watch if you don't want to. You don't have to hang the bunting out and reserve the open-top bus.

But don't deny her the enjoyment if it does happen.

She's going to wring every last day out of running. Why not? On Wednesday she took Sophie and Ciara to their first race. Headstarts for the little ones.

The fools gave Ciara a headstart and she led from start to finish, 2,000 metres. Bam! Afterwards she pronounced herself well satisfied. Sonia could see that Ciara had probably just had her first and last headstart in a running race.

In 30 years' time the rivalry between the two of them will be the talk of the Green Belt Relay crowd as the Millennium Group strive for their 31st Stick in succession. Hold on to your Zimmers, fellas.