In The Winning Zone prides itself on being the best choice in Scotland for interviews with athletes.  From rising stars to current champions at the top of their game to past masters from yesteryear, we have covered the widest range of athletes and events in Scottish sport.

Occasionally, however, we get the chance to speak to someone really special.  Someone who hasn’t just excelled in their sport, but someone who makes our spine tingle when we think back to their careers, a true global ambassador.

This interviewee is one of those, a sporting name recognisable to even the most ardent of non-sports followers.  An Olympic medallist, a World Champion and even a BBC Sports Personality of the Year, Liz McColgan, a distance runner of the highest calibre, is a Scottish sporting icon.

She first arrived on the map as the unmarried Liz Lynch, when she won gold in front of a home-crowd at the 1986 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh in the 10,000m. 

In 1988 at the Seoul Olympics, having led from the start the 10,000 metre final, McColgan was pipped at the post by Olga Bondarenko of the Soviet Union for gold. 

Two years later she retained her Commonwealth crown, and in 1991 she became a World Champion in the same event, winning a dramatic race in Tokyo, sweeping the field by leaving a 20 second gap between herself and her nearest rival.

McColgan, from Dundee, then stepped up to the challenging world of the marathon, and duly stamped her authority all over that event too, winning the New York, London and Tokyo marathons between 1991 and 1996.  She now coaches a group of talented young runners in the Dundee area.

In The Winning Zone caught up with Liz in Carnoustie, where she runs her Health Clinic gym, to reminisce on an incredible career, and to find out what the legendary Scot is up to now.

1. Whenever you were growing up in Dundee, there weren’t a lot of girls doing your sport at the time.  How did you develop as an athlete, how you get into it in the first place and what made you want to do it?

LM: “I think it was a mixture of things. The reason I got started was simply through school.  There was a PE teacher who was a marathon runner and instead of going to play hockey, he used to send the class out on cross country runs and I was always leading them and able to do whatever he told us to do.

“He then advised me to go along to his friend, who was a coach at his local club. It was just a process, he sent 4 girls along, we all went and I was the one that stuck at it. So it was really just by chance. It was a difficult thing because when I was running, when I first started, nobody made it as a profession.  It wasn’t like you could think about running as a job and making money at it.

“The only reason that I like running - it wasn’t because I was good at it as I always maintain that I wasn’t really very talented – is because of what it gave to me.  There was a lot going on in my life, I was a very shy person and I’d be the type that would just sit and look out the window in class.

“There was an awful lot going on around me and when I started running, there was just a thing there I could get out of that and be on my own. And in some weird sadistic way, the more I hurt, the better I liked it. It was like I could control what I was doing, and nobody could control me, and I think that’s why I got into it more than anything, and I’ve always said it’s just sheer hard work that got me there.

“It probably goes back to the hardships as a child, but I’ve always been able to really push myself and be very disciplined and hard on myself to get the best out of myself, and I think that running was a great way for me to use those attributes that I had.”

2.  People saw you running on the world stage, and winning on the world stage, but what a lot of people miss is the amount of work you have to put in.

LM: “Oh, yeah, I put in an awful amount of hard work. I probably worked harder than most to get where I was and there were a lot of setbacks on the way as well. 

“Again, it goes back to lifestyles, I didn’t have a lot of support. There were always a lot of walls thrown up in my face. Wherever I went, people were always saying you’ll never do this, you’ll never do that. It was very difficult.  I would get bullied because people would be like ‘what are you running for, what are you doing that for? What a weirdo’.”

“I went through an awful lot of problems at school because I was different and I didn’t hang out I didn’t drink the Babysham and lager with friends. It just didn’t happen with me and that was difficult, because you are growing up and you are very alienated because you are doing something that you want to do.  You don’t really know why you are doing it, but you are.

“And then when my name started getting put into the papers, they then though, “oh look at her.” It didn’t matter what you did or what success you had, there would always be something negative towards it.

“Now pathways are so easy. A little bit of talent and doors open. I found that just because of where I came from, the way I was brought up, doors were closed to me and it was very hard to break that down.  All through my career, I just had to take charge of things for me, for myself and just keep at it and I really did put an awful lot of work into what I did.”

3.  Was it more about getting the best out of yourself than it was about beating other people, or about winning medals?

LM: “Yeah, I’ve never bothered about people that I’ve beaten and to be honest, to this day,  I couldn’t tell you where I won the medals or what time I won the medals, because it’s not of interest to me.

“Even the big ones, like the Olympics and World Championships, I wouldn’t know what time I ran in the race or anything. That wasn’t what the running was about for me.

“My running has always been to see how I could be. I always saw the bigger picture of what I was doing rather than being concerned about what people thought about me. At the end of the day, the onus was down to me to perform and if I didn’t perform it was up to me, it was my fault, so that was just the ethos I had.

“I didn’t ever run the perfect race for me.  My times in training were definitely a lot better than the actual performance times that I ran. So I knew that I could have run faster and my only regret is that I didn’t get the fastest marathon that I believe I could have done.

“When I started running I was only 12 and when I was 13 and 14, I didn’t ever think I was good enough, even when I was 19 and I won the Commonwealth Games, two years before that I would never had dreamed I could have done that. So my whole thing was just to be the best I could be, whatever that was.”

4.  It is said that nowadays a lot of young athletes assume, because they are good, they don’t need to work hard and don’t need to put the effort in.  Do you agree with that?

LM: “Yes, they’re a 100 miles away from world class yet they expect to be given everything that an Olympian has and they’ve not done the work.  A lot of really talented athletes that I see rest back on their laurels, but what they forget is that they’re still maybe five or six seconds down on a world class performance, and it takes a good few years to get that off if you’re on a middle or long distance event, and it’s a lot of work.

“I always worked hard. As a 16 year old, I’d be running 60 or 70 miles a week.  At 19, when I was doing Commonwealth Games, I was running 90 miles in an easy week and on a hard week I’d be covering 110 miles.  Then when I went to marathons, I was going from 110 to 145 miles, so I’ve always been a really hard worker.

“At the same time, although I did all these miles, my intensity and speed of running was also very good. There was a lot of quality in my running. It wasn’t long slow miles. I’ve always felt that I worked harder than I needed to, it just never leaves you, and you’ve always got a point to prove. I don’t rest.”

5.  WZ: People always say that you dominated races, we might have already covered this in the conversation that we have just had. When you were in the each race did you know you were dominating the race?

LM: “I never let anybody take races to me and I wasn’t scared.  I knew my limitations in a race and I knew what other people could do. I would never let other sprinters sit on my shoulder.  A lot of people used to ask why I always front ran because there were a lot of sprinters in the field. 

“When I was racing I was very dominant, people used to wait for me to move and that was a lot of control on my part. Again it comes down to having an aura around you when you are in that situation.  I created such an aura about me and how I could control things, how I ran and how strong I was that people started to believe the stories, and this is what racing is about. 

“You can’t win and shake everybody’s hand on the start line and wish everybody luck because everybody is in the race to win, why would you do that!?  After the race is over it is totally different. There was a period when I did dominate and I was the best in the world and I took it to people because that is the way that I got the best performance for me.

“There was always a risk though.  A perfect example was in the 1988 Olympics, Bondarenko just sat there and with about 600m to go I tried to go again but the gap just wasn’t enough and away she went.   But at the end of the day she was on drugs, which is a major difference as well.”

6. WZ: You’re now a parent of a talented runner, your daughter Eilidh, who competed at the Commonwealth Youth Games last year, and your husband was an athlete too.  Is there a right way or a wrong way for a parent to raise a child if they want to become an athlete?

LM: There isn’t really a right or wrong way because you do get pushy parents that think they’re kids are the best in the world and they push and push then they actually ruin the child.  You also get the parent that lets them do whatever they want and they don’t get support so the same thing happens to them too.  It’s really about striking a balance. 

“For me with my own children, I give them every opportunity for what they want and don’t close doors.  When they feel like they don’t want to do it then I’m happy just to back off but I do try to make them enjoy whatever they are doing.  It doesn’t matter whether they are good at it or bad at it but that they enjoy it.

“I really don’t care what the children do as long as they do something that they enjoy and I’m not a person that would force my own sport on anybody.  What I like to see is activity in children and if you go to children at a very young age then you can identify with what sport they would be suited to and what skills they have.” 

7. WZ: Now that you are a coach yourself, what do you see at the primary role of a coach and what should they be doing?
LM: “To develop an athlete or sports person to be the best at whatever they can be.  A problem that we have with a lot of our coaches is that some of them think that they are God and they know everything. 

“A good coach is a coach who is always willing to learn and always very open to know that they don’t know everything. I have met a lot of coaches through my career that think they know everything and that they are the best. The best coach is someone who can communicate with the athlete and get the balance between their life style and their sport.”

8. WZ: Do you also have to find a balance between you being a technical coach, the motivational coach and the mentor?

LM: “Obviously different people need different things. One of the problems I have at the moment with one of my athletes is mentally he is not strong enough.  We will have to work on this together. 

“It’s identifying what the weaknesses are and if I can’t help them, then I will bring someone else who can.  If any coach came to me and said I know the secret, I wouldn’t believe them because there is no secret.  Everybody has then own various abilities. 

“I coach anything from 800m to 10,000m and some marathon runners but there is so much difference between them all. I do have to focus on certain people more so than others when they are at the British Level.”

9. WZ: Is there a lot of that you have learned from sport that you can translate into your business and health centres?

LM: “The knowledge, background and people that I have met along the way is very good experience for working with people in the fitness industry. My main area is weight loss and planning nutritional diets.  You do learn an awful lot along the way about what can work for you. It is a totally different way of using your skills.  It has definitely helped me.

“Our gym is not a massive fitness gym.  We try to get people to interact with each other whilst they are exercising and help them to listen to their body to help them understand why they are doing a certain thing and why you get a result from a certain thing. Our clientele is 45 and above.  We are trying to encourage people to be active and enjoy what they are doing, whether it’s to get fit or to lose weight.”

10. WZ: Finally, you have experienced what it was like to represent and win for Scotland on home soil at the Commonwealth Games in 1986.  So how important are the Glasgow games in 2014 to Scotland? 

LM: “The greatest experience I ever had all throughout my running career was the Commonwealth Games, even though it was a lower level competition.  Never again have I experienced the emotions of winning on that day. To have the whole stadium shouting your name was an amazing moment. 

“It actually could be one of the worst things that happened to because nothing else lived up to it!  Even when I was a world champion it didn’t feel the same as when I experienced it with everyone in Edinburgh.

“When I ran in Edinburgh it was pouring with rain and it was great that everyone stayed.  In Edinburgh there is an underground tunnel, underneath the track.  When I won my medal I had to wait in there to get my medal presentation and thought everyone had gone home.  But when I was called on I could hear everyone shouting my name and saw that the whole place was packed with people, it was unbelievable. 

“It will be a great experience for all the athletes that will be there to take part in Glasgow.”

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