SENIOR WOMEN'S FINAL: Britain's Yelling back with a bang

To quote the course announcer at Dublin's Santry Demense course on Sunday, "This can only be described as a masterful piece of running." 

They were appropriate words uttered as Great Britain's Hayley Yelling was close to the line and just a few seconds away from regaining the SPAR European Cross Country Championships title she won in 2004.

Even more remarkable, the 35-year-old school teacher has only been training seriously again since the start of November.

If you look back to the news on www.european-athletics.org, almost exactly 12 months ago to the day, it was announced that Yelling had decided to hang up her spikes in the wake of a disappointing 19th place last year in Brussels.

However, the running bug started to bite again at the start of the winter and clearly her appetite has returned in force.

To many people's amazement, Yelling pushed hard from the gun and started to move away from the field just a kilometre into the 8018m race. 

After the first lap of 1650m, she had four seconds advantage over a 14-strong chasing pack that was headed by the highly favoured Portuguese pair of Inês Monteiro and Ana Dulce Félix, as well as the local poster girl of the event, Mary Cullen.

The gap stayed the same through the next lap, although the group behind her was reduced to five - Monteiro, Félix and fellow Portuguese runner Jessica Augusto along with Spain's Rosa María Morató and the Netherlands' Adrienne Herzog, as Cullen started to slip back - with Yelling looking remarkably relaxed despite her slightly awkward running action of her arms swinging across her front.

Yelling then made another surge from the halfway point and had six seconds to spare over Augusto and Morató, second and fifth last year, who had slowly shaken themselves free of their companions at the next check point at 4823m.

In the sixth kilometre, with Yelling still running in very confident fashion apart from rather delicately picking her way around the occasional but growing patches of mud on the course, Morató started to edge away from Augusto in a bid to add to her bronze medal from 2007.