On the outside looking in, the marathon man Manchester managed to forget

Ron Hill Interview: A legend of the Games is living on its doorstep. Andrew Longmore meets a hurt hero who deserves greater respect

Ron Hill watched the opening ceremony of the XVIIth Commonwealth Games from a vantage point high above the town. Few could boast a better claim to a seat among the distinguished guests down below, but times have moved on and instant celeb-rity is deemed a more relevant qualification than athletic endurance.

So an Essex-born multi-millionaire footballer takes centre stage in Manchester's big show alongside a five-times Olympic champion who has never competed in a Commonwealth Games, and Ron Hill, who was born in Accrington and has lived on the outskirts of Manchester for nearly 50 years, who has raced in 76 countries, completed 115 marathons, won Commonwealth and European gold and, yesterday, ran for the 13,685th day in succession, is banished to a view from the gods.

Surely Hill's credentials were worthy of a place in the final baton relay? Instead, and only after persistent pestering of the organisers by a friend, Hill carried the baton through an industrial estate in Duckenfield, watched by his wife and a friend; hardly terrain fit for a hero. Trying to gain press accreditation to record today's marathon for the final chapter of a book he is writing on Man-chester marathons has only added to the indignity. After much debate, he has been allowed to collect a day pass to the stadium from Gate 10. Ron Who?

You would recognise the face, fuller and more tanned than in his heyday, but still etched with the miles. His training diary for the morning reads: "Four-mile cross-country course. Easy running. Knees and foot not too bad. Temperature: 60 degrees Fahrenheit." By last Tuesday, his body had 142,000 miles on the clock, which, he adds with the hint of a smile, would take him halfway to the moon, and his most recent concession to the approach of his 65th birthday is to cut down his weekly mileage from 35 to 30 miles.

He began to run every day on 20 December 1964, and has done so ever since, including the day after suffering a head-on car collision and spending a night in hospital with a broken sternum. He has run with a plaster cast on his foot and records a broken shoulder bone merely to point out that the pain came not from the running but from lifting his arm far enough to press the button on his stopwatch. Every step has been timed, every session logged, back to September 1956, each neat line telling of a man in the grip of a terrible obsession.

"No, not the 'O' word, please," he pleads. "I take it as a challenge. I'm a very determined person. If I missed a day, that streak would be gone, so my attitude to a run is not 'If I'm going to go', it's 'When am I going to run?' I find it interesting trying to juggle things around. It's fun in a way."

Judge for yourself, though, the intricate mechanism of a mind powered by the second hand. Hill used to run twice a day and once on Sundays. But, having decided that was too much, he needed a reason to drop down to once a day. At the time, his regime had lasted for just over 26 years.

"I couldn't go on to reach 30 years, but the number 27 had no meaning," he recalls. "Then I realised: 26.2 is the marathon distance in miles. A quick calculation meant I only had a week left to go." And, in 1991, Hill juggled his final training sessions of the year to ensure that by the end of it his lifetime mileage was exactly 200,000km.

Another set of numbers defines Hill's place in the firmament of great endurance runners. In 1970, at the Commonwealth Games marathon in Edinburgh, Hill ran 2hr 09.28sec, a time which still ranks in the British top 10 to this day. Had Hill not spent the last lap in the stadium waving to his family, or had there been regular time checks on the course, he might have broken the world record. Derek Clayton, the world record holder, was left in tears on the kerbside so unsparing was Hill's pace.

The photograph of Hill crossing the finishing line, the number 108 adorning his string vest, takes pride of place in the picture gallery on the stairs. He is smiling, confident, an athlete absolutely at the height of his powers, and the gold medal proved to be the centrepiece of a remarkable treble. In 1969, he won gold in the European Championships over the original marathon course in Athens; later in 1970, in an era which included Ron Clarke, Frank Shorter, Mamo Wolde and Kip Keino, he confirmed his status as the best long-distance athlete in the world by winning the Boston Marathon, a trip only made possible in those amateur days by the members of the Roadrunners Club, who had a whip-round to fund the air fare. But, in marathon circles, that run through the streets of Edinburgh is still recorded with awe.

"I was in Colombia running a half- marathon recently and the announcer got me on the stage at the finish as the guy who had run two hours, nine minutes 30 years ago," says Hill. "It was a bit embarrassing, really, because the race winners were left forgotten. When I went to open the athletes' village here, some Australians said I was still remembered over there. I think I was lucky. I had that purple patch, winning the Europeans, the Commonwealth and the Boston Marathon. But I'd been around a long time by then, run in Olympics and things, so it was partly a matter of longevity."

Accolades have come from the sports minister of Mauritius, from the mayor of Wheeling, West Virginia, who presented Hill with an inscribed plaque thanking him for his commitment to the local race, and in a recent race in Blackpool, where one competitor ran with Hill for 4km just to have a chat. Only in his home town has the career of the former Commonwealth champion been downgraded to the footnotes. "I've no explanation, honestly. Some of my running colleagues have been incensed that I wasn't doing anything on the last day [of the baton relay]. I'm not angry, just disappointed and hurt.

"We watched with 200 people in the pub up the road and I was embarrassed to walk in and for people to ask me, 'Why aren't you down there?' I haven't any answers, except to say that it's show business now, it's not sport. I mean if I can't even have a pass to get access to the press centre, there's something wrong."

Sometimes, though, Hill became a victim of his own obstinacy. As a child, his inspiration was the comic-book hero Alf Tupper, "Tough of the Track", immortalised in the pages of Rover. Alf emerged from a background not dissimilar to the two-up, two-down terraced house in Accrington where Hill was brought up and, like Hill, Alf always seemed to be on the wrong side of the tracks, training at nights down shuttered streets against the backdrop of the gasholders. In Alf's footsteps, Hill would drive to work on a Monday morning, leave his van in the car park, run there and back for the rest of the week and drive home again on Friday evening.

Questions about his athletics would be greeted with irritation. "I'm at work, why are you talking about my running?" But that was Hill, restless, independent, often suspicious of the world. The same spirit of curiosity which once made him rip the side of his running shorts to ease his freedom of movement in a cross-country race pitched him headfirst into the world of nutritional experiment. Hill was one of the pioneers of the split-sided running shorts and the first to adapt a glycogen-loading diet from cycling to marathon running.

At Munich in 1972, a combination of training and dietary overload effectively ended his chances of becoming an Olympic champion. "I was favourite for that Olympic marathon, but I went to St Moritz to train at altitude for a month and ran 120 miles a week," he says "I knew I was getting tired, but I'd made a plan so I had to stick to it." He shows me a photograph from the second volume of his auto-biography, The Long Hard Road. It is an unused still taken from the film of the Games directed by John Schlesinger, silhouetting the haunted face of a loser. The text describes the feeling as "just an intense and sickening disappointment".

"I was 13th at halfway and the leader was out of sight," says Hill. "I had a long way to reflect on shattered dreams, but I would rather be 12th than 13th, so I kept going. It took me a year to realise that I was running with my hands clenched in memory of that race."

Hill might have won gold in Munich, could have won a medal in Mexico City had the selectors not chosen him for the 10,000m not the marathon. But the 1962 European Championships, when he was carried to the finish in an ambulance, is the one race he would like to replay. "I remember thinking, 'What have I done here?' I wanted them to take me back to the 30km mark and let me finish, even if I had to walk the whole way. I vowed that I would never drop out of a marathon again."

Hill's energy has not been confined entirely to the road. For a time, Ron Hill Sports was a highly successful business until the recession of the late Eighties bit into his profits. The company became overstretched and as the debt mounted, Hill's weight dropped from nine and a half to eight and a half stones. Finally, he sold the name to another brand manufacturer to stave off the threat of bankruptcy and, using his PhD in textile chemistry, has set up another company, Hilly, which designs and manufactures sports socks.

It is a hobby now as much as a business, like his running. A knee injury has hindered his attempt to race in 100 different countries. He achieved 50 by the age of 50, 60 by 60, and, had the stock market not crashed taking his pension with it, he would have retired to warmer climes by now and had time to make a serious tilt at completing the collection. His 11 countries last year included Algeria, the Peace Marathon in Israel, Chile, Colombia and a race up and down the main boulevard to mark the 10th anniversary of independence for the Ukraine. On 11 September, he was stuck in Panama en route to run a 10km race in the Cayman Islands. In Cuba, reduced to an agonised limp by an injury to his left leg, he was beaten to the finish by his wife. A half-marathon in Riga earlier this year took his total to 76, and Cambodia in December provides a promising target for number 77.

Questioning the extent of the physical punishment on a near-pensioner's physique prompts a rare glimpse of irritation. "When the morning comes when I can't run any more, I'll be dead. Why should people have to stop doing things? I've had to change and it's taken me a long time to learn because I always thought I was immortal, I thought the body would heal itself. But there's nothing in the world that says you have to stop doing something because you're 60, is there?

"It's a silly idea. People make themselves old by thinking they're old. I don't believe in that. I did everything I could to become the best runner I could and if I failed, it was because I was too brave. I'm happy with that."

It is just a shame Manchester have chosen to ignore a champion of their own.

Biography: Ron Hill

Born: Accrington, Lancashire, on 25 September 1938.

Education: Graduated from Manchester University with a textile designs degree.

Career highlights include: won the 1969 European Championship marathon in Athens and also the 1970 Commonwealth marathon in Edinburgh. Also competed in the 1966 Commonwealth Games, where he finished sixth in the 10,000m, and came 18th in the 1974 Commonwealth Games marathon. Other major events include appearances in the marathon at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City and four years later in Munich.

Post-career: Established a company called Ron Hill Sports, which manufactures sportswear.