Catherina McKiernan believes that her preparation for a second success in the London marathon is still on schedule despite her shortage of competitive racing.

Plans for a 10 kilometres road race in Europe last Sunday, were abandoned after an extensive search of the calendar, had failed to uncover a suitable event.

Given that most of the top long distance runners were in Belfast for the World Cross Country Championships at the weekend, that was scarcely surprising but the end product is that she is now going to have to rely exclusively, on her training schedules to assess her current form.

Since undergoing surgery on a knee injury in December, she has had just one race, a half marathon which she won with some ease in Paris.

That compares with four straight wins in the corresponding period last year when, high on the merit of her first marathon success in Berlin, she grew in confidence with each consecutive run.

On the face of it, her build up to a potentially difficult meeting with Fernanda Ribeiro in London, is flawed but if it worries members of her entourage, it's not immediately discernible.

Stressing that the athlete was on a steep learning curve in marathon running 12 months ago, they believe that she is now sufficiently well versed in the demands of the event, to be able to redress the imbalance with experience.

McKiernan, a skilled practitioner in the under statement, insists that her programme is going reasonably well. With South Africa's Elena Meyer now joining Ribeiro at the head of the opposition, nothing less is likely to suffice in the big test coming up on April 18th.

Reflections on the World Cross Country Championships, harden the conviction that the gap separating African runners from the rest of the world is now, if anything, even more pronounced.

In horse racing terms, the great majority of Europe's leading male runners, would be entitled to claim a stone in competition with Kenya's Paul Tergat. And watching Gete Wami reduce her rivals to rabble in the women's race, one wondered how even a fully fit Sonia O'Sullivan would have coped on the day.

In terms of athleticism, the Africans have raised cross country running to levels undreamed of, 30 years ago. And yet, in their excellence, they are, paradoxically, devaluing it as a spectator sport.

Competition is the oxygen of all international sport. And Europe urgently needs to find some means of competing on level terms with the Kenyans and Ethiopians in distance running, if athletics is to prosper.

Perhaps, it was the cold inevitability of it all, which prevented the Belfast public from turning up in greater numbers for what was, by some way, the most important sporting event in the city's history.

That was a pity for the presentation was as thorough and as skilled, as any we have witnessed in this event since it went truly international in the mid-1970s. That was an opinion echoed by the great majority of the visiting press corps and it bespoke the enormous amount of work which had gone into the project at local level.

In providing a course taken from the manuals of the 1940s, they provoked a debate which I suspect, will still be raging when the IAAF gets round to the task of nominating venues for future championships.

Years of championship competition on parkland courses, fuelled the argument that cross country running had lost its soul. But is what we saw at Barnett Demesne at the weekend, the way forward? I think not.