Darrell’s diary: ‘I really like racing and, to be honest, I quite like having a blether and the day out, too.’

Wednesday 3rd July 2024

Darrell Hastie wins Lindsays Masters XC in Glasgow back in 2023 (photo by Bobby Gavin)

By Katy Barden 

It was mid-cross country season and Darrell Hastie was feeling disheartened: ‘I must not be cut out for this longer-distance running‘, he thought at the time.

Over a decade later and the Gala Harriers athlete – who first started running on the Border Games circuit as a 12-year-old – is a multiple national Masters champion on the road, track and cross country.

Most recently he won the Scottish men’s V40 marathon title with a superb 2:24:41 lifetime best in London.

‘I didn’t realise back then that I had to train specifically (for longer-distance events),’ he laughs.

‘Looking back now, my training wasn’t geared to running five or six miles in the mud!’

Hastie’s early running experiences were predominantly on grass tracks, but he was selected to represent the East District (U17) at the 1998/99 Scottish Inter-District Cross Country Championships at Holyrood Park in Edinburgh, his first experience of such a high-profile event.

When he left school at 16 and started working full-time in a factory his training, and in turn his performances, suffered.

It was a bitter pill to swallow when he felt he was at last ‘getting somewhere’ with the sport.

Although he didn’t ever stop running, he became disillusioned with the Border Games where he’d first made his name. By his late 20s he had a young family, but he’d also started to enjoy some success in local road races which acted as a trigger for making the move back into mainstream competition.

‘Around that time a couple of my mates had joined Gala Harriers,’ says the former Teviotdale Harrier.

‘I thought I could maybe do the same, that I could train with them a couple of times a week and do the East District League cross country and a couple of relays.

‘I really got back into it from that point. I watched them training and I thought, ‘Alright, this is how you train for a 10k or a half marathon’.’

His initial goal was to finish top-20 in the East District League and in his first individual race back – an East District League fixture in Stirling, 2014 – he finished 18^th.

Later that winter he was selected to run in the Scottish Inter-District Cross Country Championships. It was a full circle moment, but this time things were different; it marked the start of a resurgence for the Kelso athlete who was…