Mayer gets off the mark in fine style

“This was my first race since the beginning of December as I’d been ill for a few weeks so, unusually for me, I was quite nervous,” admitted Viner, 23, who fits training and competitions around her full-time job as a press officer in the civil service.

“But you have to commit from the beginning, so I put myself among the first 20 runners very early on and slowly began to move up the field.”

She said: “It was quite a challenging course — the ground was ridiculously muddy — but I kept my mind in gear and just focused on what was ahead, rather than letting myself get distracted by the conditions.”

In the U20 men’s race, Brighton & Hove’s Tomer Tarragano missed out on gold by centimetres, pipped at the post by the eventual winner. The two were so close on the line that they recorded exactly the same time, down to one hundredth of a second.