My greatest race: Deena Kastor

Olympic marathon medallist and former London Marathon winner looks back on winning the Carlsbad 5000 in April 2002 in 14:53.8

Carlsbad was always traditionally the weekend after the World Cross Country Championships so it was always a party by the sea. The best of those from the World Cross would end up in San Diego, on the beach, collecting seashells. It was the last race of the winter season so you could just lay it on the line after a relaxing week in southern California.

I’d been at the World Cross in Dublin and came second to Paula Radcliffe. It was my first World Cross medal and I finished that race just excited to be on the podium. I was sprightly and jumping up and down but when I looked over and Paula had her hands on her knees and I saw how spent she was, I was like: “Oh, I didn’t give it everything.” So the next weekend, I was like: “I’m not going to pace this, I am just going to tear off this starting line and be all out from the gun. It’s only 3.1 miles, 5km.”

I didn’t have jet lag. Maybe I was waking up at three o’clock in the morning but then I would take a three-hour nap in the afternoon. It was just such a leisurely week in between, not having a lot of responsibility. It also seemed pretty easy.

My husband is also my physio so he would work on me every morning before races. He’d set up his massage table, warm up his hands by rubbing them together and then put them on my legs to start working. This time, he took them off. And he said: “I don’t need to do anything.” I was like: “What do you mean?” He told me he wasn’t doing anything, that I was good to go. He felt this electrical pulse and thought ‘she doesn’t need a thing’.

Those are really the days that runners chase – when we have a little bit of that runner’s high and we feel like we can go on a pace forever. We just get into this beautiful flow when we’re running – a great effort which feels effortless.

We don’t get it very often. We lace up our shoes, hoping that it’s going to arrive. This was just one of those magical days and, from the second the gun fired on the streets of Carlsbad, I just tore off and rode that red line for the entire time.

Running has so many sports within it. We have indoor track and cross country, outdoor track and road racing – and then the marathons kind of in a category of their own. Cross country, I feel, offers you a grit and a…