It seems a pity that while there is an official history of the Scottish Men's Track and Field Championships and a history of the Scottish Men's Cross Country Union, there are no equivalent publications for the women endurance - or indeed any other kind - runners.   Since this site deals with Scottish athletics, mainly road running and almost exclusively marathon running, it is appropriate the we include the women who have done so much for Scottish distance running over the years be included.   The absence of either of the publications mentioned above makes research difficult so progress might be slow but we will start on it and cover as much as we can.  

When we started with the men, others emailed or phoned offering pictures, information and in one case even articles about some heroes that we hadn't come to.    I hope that the same will be true of this page - the absence of detailed records means that there is a lot of information and pictures out there that would be very useful.   We also found that many recently retired athletes were delighted to co-operate and we received a lot of help that way too.   Let's hope the women are not too shy.   When we look at the records some of the feats are quite outstanding - I will only mention Lesley Watson's having 17 of the top 20 Scottish marathon times in 1981 and all inside 3:00 hours as an indication.   Neither I nor anyone I have spoken to can come up with any male athlete who had even an approximation of this feat.   Seventeen marathons in one year is some going!    They also ran ultra marathons - the picture of Shona above was taken at the 100 mile challenge race.   The record of Liz McColgan is well known throughout the world for top class marathon racing and Sandra had a top flight career before becoming a veteran and gaining even more honours.   Dale Greig of course was of course the first world record holder for the women's marathon in 1964 and in a recent US poll was ranked above such as Ingrid Kristiansen and Rosa Mota in the 'Greatest Women Marathon Runners of All Time' ranking list.   Karen MacLeod is our other Olympic marathon runner as well as a regular Scottish and British internationalist.

In an attempt to give an idea of how men's and women's times match up, I have had a look at the International Scoring tables, taken the points score for particular men's times and then linked them with the women's times that would gain the same points.   We get this rough measure of equivalence.

The latest addition to this page is Angela Mudge - renowned international hill runner.   The link is below.

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