Pride of place for the 'other' world champ

One of Britain's two world champion athletes will be among the 30,000 in the Flora London Marathon today. It is unlikely that many people will notice. "Yes, I don't suppose many people can name Britain's other world champion," Simon Pride mused as he prepared to head down to the English capital from Fochabers in north-east Scotland.

Pride's public profile may not be as high as Colin Jackson's but, like the high hurdler who struck gold at the track-and-field world cham-pionships in Seville last summer, he happens to be the proud possessor of a world athletics title.

He won it with the ultra-distance running equivalent of a sprint finish in Chavagnes, France, last May, taking the lead in the 62nd and final mile of the 100km world champ-ionship race. Not that conquering the world, even in such dramatic fashion, has elevated the former soldier into élite status on the global athletics stage. "I'm certainly not as rich as Colin Jackson," he said. "I got £300 when I won the world title. There haven't been many spin-offs since. I'm still working full-time as a postman."

At least Pride has caught up with Jackson in one respect. "I used to be in the same Welsh junior team as Colin," he said, recalling his teenage days as an 800m-cum-1500m runner in Swansea Harriers. It is a measure of how far he has come in his running life since then that the 42,000 metres of the marathon is a relative sprint for him now, as a 32-year-old.

Today's race, in fact, will only be Pride's fifth marathon and his first in London. "I jumped into ultra-distance races before doing any marathons," he said. "I was always kind of terrified of the marathon distance."

Those fears, however, are rapidly subsiding. In January Pride finished 10th in the Houston Mara-thon, clocking 2hr 21min 34sec - his fastest time for the distance by almost three minutes - in hot and humid conditions. "I'm expecting another personal best in London," he said. "Hopefully I'll get dragged round to a good time."

Breaking the 2hr 20min barrier is Pride's prime objective today. If he were to make another major improvement, though, and break 2:14, he could be back in the same team as Jackson - heading for the Sydney Olympics as a marathon man in September.

Hours of fun

Simon Pride has been a British record-holder for 11 months now, his winning time in Chavagnes last May, 6hr 24min 05sec, having eclipsed Don Ritchie's 100km mark. George Littlewood has been a British record-holder for quite a while longer - for 111 years and five months, in fact. He has been dead for 88 years, but his phenomenal six- day record lives on. And so does his name.

The George Littlewood Six-Hour Track Challenge, organised by the Steel City Striders, took place from 6pm to midnight last night at the Don Valley Stadium in Sheffield - a short jog from the King's Head pub Littlewood bought with the $6,000 he earned for his quite literally staggering run in New York in 1888. At the end of the fifth day of the six-day world championship race at Madison Square Garden a match was deliberately dropped into the alcohol bath in which Littlewood was soaking his aching feet. The culprit, presumed to be a disgruntled backer of one of his rivals, was never caught. Neither was Littlewood.

His feet and legs were badly burned but he carried on, hobbling at times, to complete 85 miles on the final day. In total, he covered 623 miles 1,320 yards - a feat described in 1966 by the physiologist B B Lloyd as "probably about the maximum sustained output of which the human frame is capable".

Two of the 36 runners who took up the George Littlewood Track Challenge might care to reflect on that assessment as they follow their six-hour stint by running in the Sheffield Marathon, which takes place this morning. "Apparently, they see our race as just a warm-up for the marathon," Roy Kitson of the Steel City Striders said.

The history man

It has become clear that the original "marathon" was run after a warm-up of quite considerable length. Legend has it that the military messenger Pheidippides ran 26 miles from the Plain of Marathon to Athens to break news of the Athenian victory over the Persians in 490BC - and that he died of exhaustion after gasping his story.

Greek historians have, however, established that Pheid-ippides' most notable long- distance feat was actually running 280 miles, from Athens to Sparta and back, in a vain request for help in the Battle of Mara-thon. The Athenians, as it happened, prevailed on the field without Spartan assistance, and it was then that Pheidippides raced from Marathon to Athens, a distance of 26 miles - to warn of an imminent invasion by the Persian fleet.

He quite possibly dropped dead of accumulated exhaustion at that point. Like George Littlewood, though, he was not forgotten. One of the walls of the Acropolis was named after him.

Boston's first lady

The marathon races inspired by Pheidippides have attracted many an inspirational runner. Tomorrow, in the 104th running of the Boston Marathon, Danalyn Adams Scharf will join the ever-lengthening list.

Three years ago she was lying in a hospital bed in Boston, recovering from a heart transplant and wondering whether she would ever walk again.

"I remember watching nurses, doctors, my parents, visitors, anyone taking steps," the 28-year-old recalled last week. "I couldn't walk. The muscles in both legs had atrophied."

Tomorrow Scharf will be running 26.2 miles - in less than five hours, she hopes. Whether or not she achieves her target time, no marathon runner can claim to have shown any greater heart.