From City to Coast

By Brendan Foster

When I was a young athlete at Gateshead Harriers we used to run every year in an event called the national cross country championships and it was the big event of the year for all the harriers. When you were 16 you ran with youths and then you’re 17, 18 you run with juniors and then eventually grew onto the seniors and it was the big event of the year and fortunately through the 70s I was fortunate to win it on one occasion and it was the biggest mass participation event in the country and I ran it in parliament hill fields and there were 1300 runners in it and I remember having grown up watching this thing, watching all these runners from all the clubs in the country running, dashing across the opening start and up this hill and there were 1300 of them and it was like wow you know you would look forward to the athletics magazine the following year to see these 1300 runners and that was the biggest mass participation event in Britain. So in 1980 I went off to New Zealand and trained in Auckland new Zealand with Dave Warcroft and he and I went training regularly and watching what was going on and suddenly we were invited to run in this event called around the bays and it was a fun run in New Zealand in Auckland and we said yeah lets go and we went along in the middle of our training and we walked to the start on the sea front Auckland and there were people everywhere you know coming from all around the place and I’ll never forget prime minister Muldoon who was the prime minister of new Zealand he was standing on the roster starting this thing and really there were 12000 people in this run and that was ten times more than id ever seen before and that Dave had ever seen before and we just looked in marvel, we couldn’t believe what it was. What is this? You know this is nothing like before. So we were running along the sea front and it went from the city Auckland through the docks and then through the business district and then finished on the beach and all the companies who had people in it had tents all on the beach and all on the greens and it was just a fantastic carnival atmosphere. So we were sitting in this tent on the beach on a beautiful day in autumn and I said to Dave I said when I get back home I’m going to organise something like this in the north east and I said just because it works this so you start in the city and you finish at the beach and that, when I came back after running in the Olympics, retired from the athletics and got the boys together and said I’ve got this idea I did this race in Auckland and they start in the city and they finish in the beach and its fantastic and I think we should do that and 6 months later we organised an event in Newcastle called the great north run which started in the city and finished on the beach and that was how the Great North Run started.