There would be three Commonwealth golds and a British 800m record to come but facing Britain’s best in the AAA under-15 800m at Crystal Palace in 1976 proved she could live in the fast lane

I grew up in a place called Llandrindod where we had a grass area that was a track in the summer and we had a really good PE teacher called Tess Davies. If there was a good runner who came through, she’d try to get them into Brecon Athletics Club and she said to me: “You might enjoy it.” 

My dad was a bit worried about sending me off with people he didn’t know, so I said: “Well come along, check out what it is.” 

He ended up doing all the timekeeping and measuring the long jump and things, so it was a fun hobby for both of us, really, and I couldn’t have done it without him.

My dad used to drive me about 45 minutes in the car and it was just my social life when I was younger. I loved the cross country, but Brecon wasn’t in any league or anything – you just did your own thing.

We’d been to Parliament Hill for the National Cross Country, which was a bit of an eye-opener. I did just about make the top 100 and my mum was really upset because all these girls came across the line covered in mud. She never went back and watched another race for about 15 years.

Me and my friend Sally got good enough to go to the women’s AAAs as it was then and went up to London which was so exciting. I got through the heat, then got past the semi-finals but I had this horrific blister on my foot. In the final there was this girl called Alison Clifford who everybody had heard of. She was ranked really highly and was clearly well-trained but I just ran out of my skin and it was a really, really close race. We virtually crossed the line together, with her diving in. I had a fantastic photograph of it. I just remember just being so amazed. I was good enough to be the best in the UK.

My mum passed away a few years ago and I brought a few boxes back from hers and that medal’s now probably in my loft. My dad made a wooden shield and he put all the medals I won on it.

At that time, athletics was a different thing to what it became and perhaps that’s why I do treasure it. There was a sort of purity about it, which I still see myself in the kids I work with now. At some point, athletics training and the whole competitive side of things becomes more pressurised and you have to take a different attitude to it but you don’t have the vividness of experience.

For me it was tempered by the fact that, even when I was running really well, it was never quite good enough for me for a lot of the time. I always felt that I hadn’t really done as well as I should have done. There are very few races that I put my hand on my heart and said that was great.

When I was 19, I went to 1981 European Indoors in Grenoble, which was my first proper senior vest for GB. I came fourth. All the talk, though, was about how the Soviet Union and East German women were probably taking drugs and it came as a bit of a shock to me. I don’t think this sport was ever really quite the same for me, because it wasn’t what I thought it had been.

The 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane, where I won the 800m, that was a surprise, because I was going to go into nursing afterwards, and I wasn’t going to run anymore. I felt that there was nothing more for me.

After that, I had to re-evaluate what I was going to do. I could do my university work and I could do training but I still thought: “Well, I’m not going to probably get any further on the world stage than that, because the Commonwealths was fairly clean.”

Then I met Tony, who became my husband. He asked me: “Do you think you’ve ever got to the bottom of your talent? Do you think you’ve ever trained as hard as you could and done everything you could do for your preparation?”

And no, I hadn’t. He asked why. “Why do you think you’re giving up? Because you could be better than you are now.” I didn’t really feel like that but then I thought: “Well, yeah, he’s right.” 

He was really prepared to support me, too, so we thought we’d give it a year of just trying to do everything we could to see if I could put it to bed. No matter what anybody else did, whether they took drugs or whatever, it didn’t matter. It was only about my own performance, so I could go into nursing feeling I’d given it my all.

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I was aiming for the 1984 Olympics but I ran really badly at the end of 1983 and I got injured and I never made the team for LA. It was so bad that we decided that we’d have to give it another year – and that was the year I broke through.

Then I went again to make the Commonwealths in Edinburgh where I got the two golds but my dad did spot that, as I got older, things had changed. He’d say: “You’ve lost that real feeling of fun about it.” It wasn’t fun. It was really hard work and I felt a great responsibility because of all the other people putting themselves out for me.