My coach says, ‘go to Lowestoft station tomorrow and only buy a single to Glasgow because you are running back’: Double Olympian and Chicago Marathon winner Paul Evans on the moment that made him

“With about 100m left to the finish line, I had a 50m gap. I knew I was going to win the stage,” says Paul Evans, thirty years after his breakthrough at The Great Race.

“My coach told me, if you win, put your hands up and make a big, big deal of it. I was not sure why he told that until later, but I guessed TV ratings had been down for the event because there had not been much British success. So I crossed the line and celebrated like he’d told me. Then a commentator puts a microphone in my face and says, ‘well done, you are the first British winner! But what about your job at the shoe factory?’ It turned out the company where I worked was making redundancies and I had no idea.”

Evans has twice competed in the 10,000m at the Olympic Games for Great Britain, he has won the Chicago Marathon, and finished third at the London Marathon. Now in his 50s, the father-of-two runs his own coaching set-up from his home in Beccles and has recently been part of the county council’s lockdown Keep Moving Suffolk campaign. But at the age of 29, he was working in a Lowestoft shoe factory and supporting a young family, with his career yet to take off. He had not long since stopped playing football and his biggest concern was whether his factory would close. Current 10,000m World Champion Joshua Cheptegei was 22 when he won the title last year. To a 22-year-old Paul Evans, a career in running would have been unimaginable.

“I ran cross country at school, but when I got to 16, or 17 I wanted to be going to the pub and chasing girls, silly things like that,” he says.

“I enjoyed football, but I was not a great player. I could run around for ninety minutes like a headless chicken, but the problem came when somebody gave me the ball!

“One summer I thought I would work on my strengths, which was my fitness. I was going out every night for a run after work.”

Evans’s first ever 10km race was at the Lowestoft Carnival. He finished seventh in a staggering 33minutes 33seconds and caught the attention of the town’s running club for being the first local man home. It was an achievement made even more remarkable for the fact he was wearing football kit and some cheap trainers, and had done little specific training. A month later he took a minute off his best to record a time hobby runners would marvel at.

“My football coach told me ‘you’re a better runner then you are a footballer,’ and he laughed, messing around, and that put a seed in my head. I thought, I hate to say it, but he’s right.”

Evans then took a ‘break’ from football, one that he is still technically on, to focus on running. It was 1988 and with the Barcelona Olympics four years away he suddenly had a goal. After being introduced to his longtime coach John Bicourt, he was training three times a day alongside his job and family commitments to make up for lost time.

“I did that for a year and I was constantly tired,” he says.

“I was racing okay, but I was tired when I was on the start-line. So the coach reduced it to two times a day, and that is when things started to happen. There was some method in his madness.

“Maybe the first year was a test to see if I was serious about wanting to go to the Olympics. Maybe I was just lucky. But I remember I used to sleep a lot!”

Evans can trace a turning point in his life back to 1990. He had now run odd events for England but was not yet a professional. Meanwhile, the shoe factory was losing work, and his working week went down to four, and then three days. What happened next would be a defining moment in his life.

“I got a phone call from my coach asking if I wanted to go and run for England in a team event called the Great Race.

“This was an event never seen before (or since) that was based on the Tour De France.

“You start in Glasgow and you run to London in seventeen different stages. There were over 100 runners in fifteen teams. They added all the times up and the runner with the lowest overall time won.”

The problem was that it required three weeks off work from a factory where workers would get a few days in August and at Christmas if they were lucky.

“I said to my coach, I can’t. I’ve got a young family, if I take time off I might get sacked.”

But the factory’s struggles continued. Evans was offered a £3,000 redundancy package, and another £3,000 as an appearance fee - with the then-new Sky BSB keen to televise promising athletes.

“Looking back now, there was clearly never a decision to make. At that time when you don’t know anything else it is quite a scary thing. And I didn’t sleep that night. I thought, should I go, should I not… I phoned up my coach and he said ‘do you believe in yourself as a runner?’ And I said, yes, I do believe I have got a future. And he said, ‘why don’t you just do it?’ He made the decision for me really.

“He says, go to Lowestoft station tomorrow and only buy a single to Glasgow because you are running back.

“I went in the next day and I was not going to tell anybody. I took my bag to work with all my luggage. There are a lot of train stations between Lowestoft and Glasgow and every station, there was part of me thinking I should get off and get the next train back.”

Evans would have to run back, but in some ways the hardest part had been done. He ran conservatively for the first week, but things changed a few days into the competition when the shoe factory got in touch with his coach.

But rather than tell Evans, Bicourt decided to let the factory see that he had made the right choice by encouraging his athlete to win a key stage, and celebrating. It was only shortly afterwards he found out the factory had announced, meanwhile, that all staff would be made redundant.

By the end of a long and tiring three weeks, Paul Evans the shoe factory worker was no more, and it was the beginning of his new life as a professional athlete. But none of it would have been possible had it not been for his decision to take a risk and compete at The Great Race, which gave him the platform to compete at the next level.

“Some things happen in your life you will always remember, and I remember walking onto the shop floor and everybody downed tools and gave me a big clap.

“They were saying, well done, you have made the right decision. That was really nice as they realised someone had come out of this quite well and everyone was losing their jobs. And that was it. I had to work a couple of weeks and then I was made redundant. I got the redundancy money, some prize money, and my appearance fee money. It was great because I spent the next year trying to be a full-time athlete.”

It was a journey that led him to becoming British number one over the 10,000m and then the marathon. He was involved in one of the strangest Olympic finals ever in Barcelona - where a lapped athlete appeared to rejoin the race and help pace his teammate to victory. He also shared a starline with the great Haile Gebreselassie at the Atlanta games in 1996, before winning the Chicago Marathon the same year - which has since been won by the likes of Eliud Kipchoge and Mo Farah.

He now says he enjoys coaching as much as competing, and has worked with Active Suffolk to help find ways to keep teenagers in sport. But Evans feels things did not work out too badly for him coming late to sport, and wants to challenge those who say they are too old to take up sport, either leisurely or competitively.

“It is very rare for young junior athletes to go onto be good seniors. They can burn out mentally and physically. So for me personally, I think my mid-20s was a good time to start.

“People always say to me, ‘just imagine if you had started when you were 16 or 17. How good might you have been.’ To be honest, I think I did the right thing, because when I was that age I had to get out and do normal things. I went back into sport when I was a lot stronger and knew exactly what I wanted. We can all say we wish we had done this or that, we are all clever in hindsight, but maybe me coming to sport late was a good thing - or maybe I could have been the new Steve Cram! Who knows.”

For Paul Evans Coaching, visit: www.paulevanscoaching.com