ATHLETICS/World Cross Country Championships: Tom Humphries talks to Sonia O'Sullivan, whose life has recently been changed by the birth of daughter Sophie and the death of her friend Kim McDonald

If you've been following the story long enough, you'll remember she was just 17 when she made that first proleptic strike on the national consciousness, a mud-splattered streak across the fields to win the National Cross Country Championship. Just a calling card dropped on the damp grass.

Now she stands at the far end of a brilliant career and wonders aloud if she might run till she's 40 and beyond. She's been thinking about Anne Keenan-Buckley and she can see how it might be done, not the grand-prix circuit and all the razzle dazzle, but the cross country things and the marathons.

Events you could look forward to and savour just like when you were a kid. She'd go to 40 if she was winning, she thinks. The fun never gets drained out of winning.

Forty! Not near enough to touch it (it's seven years away) but close enough to discern it. She can see the official reaching for the last-lap bell and, you know, she's not ready for a final lap yet. Sonia thinks she might like to come back and run another national cross country or two, you know the sort of thing, win a couple on the way up, win a couple more on the way down. Book-ends. Perhaps thinking those thoughts takes the pressure off. This run in Leopardstown tomorrow, this outing in front of a large Irish crowd, they are saying that this could be the last time.

It may be the last time, she doesn't know.

What she does know is that she feels that familiar old belly-tightening hunger in the pit of her stomach. After a winter punctuated by love, birth and death she didn't know if it would still be there, but coming back from Australia with Sophie on her lap a couple of weeks ago, her mind wandered to the World Cross Country Championships and stayed there. The stewardess came through the cabin offering chocolate sweets and it was no hardship to refuse. Sonia was in that place again.

"The place you get to a while out from a big race, when you are fit, when you don't get distracted by people around you, when you just want to eat good food and get ready for it. You don't even think of it. People wonder if you feel like your missing out on things. It's the opposite."

So she catches herself in vacant moments, sketching it out in her head; the Kenyans at the start-line, wound up like toys, everyone else bouncing on their toes, watching them. She'll tell herself what she always has told herself. Go with them when they sprint from start-line and, if you can't stay with them, come back at them on the second kilometre.

Whatever happens, keep going, keep competitive right till the end. And then her old feral instincts might possess her again and give her a win that she has no right to think of - not as a mother of two, nudging middle-age, with just a couple of months' training under her belt.

For the past couple of weeks she's been running in London with the young Australian runner, Craig Mottram, and as they go she tells him things, just like she was told when she was a kid. She tells him about the preparations for races, about that zone, that lean place, that private room you go to. Sometimes he's fascinated, sometimes she can tell he's bored stiff, but she talks anyway. It passes the time on a 90-minute run and, anyway, it's a springtime for sentiment.

Races. She wonders if young Craig understands races, if any of what she passes on even applies to him, if there are rules for any great athlete. For Sonia, there were always the Sonia Rules, she's always been as temperamental as a thoroughbred.

She remembers the European Championships 10,000 metres in 1998. Just over two weeks beforehand she decided that she was going to go to Budapest and run it. Her announcement was met with shaking heads all round. So, two Sundays before Budapest, she ran a 3,000 in Sheffield. Had a row with Nick (Bideau, her partner) that morning, didn't know what she was doing there, couldn't concentrate. She came back to London and her crew said: "See. How do you think you'll concentrate for 25 laps when you couldn't manage that."

In her bones she knew, though.

She went for a run with Kim (McDonald) that week. All the while he was trying to convince her not to run the 10,000, how could she after being crushed in 1996 and 1997?

"He's telling me this and I'm not listening. The more he's telling me the more I'm going the other way. I'm saying to him I can do it, I can do it. I'm not listening to you. I'm not listening to you."

Ah, Kim McDonald. Once he had been what she called the ABC of her life. Agent. Boyfriend. Coach. Now she couldn't hear a word he said. When Kim saw black, Sonia saw white and embraced it.

After the intense, almost suffocating time of their personal and professional togetherness, they repelled each other after 1996, staying in contact only through a thin skin of mutual self-reliance. He was her agent and she needed him because he was the best. She was his runner. He needed her for the same reason.

Perhaps all this would be too complicated for Craig Mottram to understand. He should know though that by last November, when McDonald died in an apartment in Brisbane, the old distance between Sonia and himself had served its purpose. Friendship had flowed into the gap and tomorrow in Leopardstown the day will be filled with his absence.

"Sunday will be the first time really," she says. "If I go down to the IAAF hotel I'll be expecting him to be there in the lobby. That's one of the places you would always see him. Just before every race he always appeared too. I don't know how. He just made sure I always saw him. I don't know why, but right from the beginning, he'd just materialise.

"It got to be a confidence thing. He'd let me know everything was okay. He didn't have to say or do anything, but I would just kind of feel that that was it, I was ready to go now. Even at the Olympics, he'd drift into the warm-up track. Everything okay? All the work is done, you're as ready as you can be."

The strangeness of not having him around strikes her every day. Little things that crop up, Kim's suggestions, Kim's influence, Kim's energy. The smallest things she does remind her of him.

"In Teddington, there's a bridge I run over every day to get to the park and it's right by his house. Every time I go over the bridge, I look over at the house. I always look in because that's what I've always done. If the windows are open, he's there. If not, maybe he's out. I didn't go in and see him or call to him when I'd pass, but I'd just notice every day.

His office, his agency, still tick on affirmations of life's blithe ceaselessness. It's still Kim's office and his people are doing their work. That's how it feels now, Sonia thinks. People just doing work.

The energy that Kim had has been gone.

"If I go in there now there's no big passionate discussions about training and races like there was with Kim. His opinion and his views are gone. All that energy. I miss that third opinion in my life. I always had to consider what Kim would have to say about something. Hopefully, something else will fill that gap and let me know the right thing to do."

She spoke to him on the Friday before he died. She was in Melbourne and he was holidaying in Brisbane, making his way to Melbourne soon. They spoke on a Friday and then she texted him on Saturday. She was in Noosa, an hour's drive north of Brisbane at a road race and, although he'd no interest in coming up, Kim wanted to know the results.

She texted him the times and placings. He texted her. Running junkie stuff. It went back and forth a few times and the last text he sent just said thanks.

It took some days for the authorities in Brisbane to release any information. They were trying to find McDonald's family to tell them that he was dead of heart failure at 45. The only numbers they could find on him were those of the office in London and some of the best athletes in the world.

On the following Saturday morning, Sonia got back from the gym and her friend Tina called and asked could she come round. Sonia heard a little alarm in her head. Another friend, Murray Plant, had left a message on Nick's phone. She started putting things together. Something wrong with Kim, definitely something wrong.

"By the time Tina came I was sort of ready. I'd prepared myself for what she was going to tell me. It was afterwards thinking about those times, when you are by yourself and you start thinking of all the things we did together or all that he did for me, that's more when it hit me. Things that will never happen or times he'll never be there.

"He'd become a good friend to me in the last year. It took that long for me to get over 1996 and 1997 and blaming him. Last year, though, we started being good friends again. I could talk to him about anything. If I wanted somebody to talk to, somebody who wasn't Nick, somebody who would look out for me but without being too close, somebody who could be more neutral than Nick could be, then I'd call him."

She tried everything to get to England for the funeral, convinced herself that she'd give birth to Sophie early and take off. Her history with Kim, right back to him introducing himself to her in his blunt Yorkshire way at a race in Lille, telling her straight off what a negative race she'd run, that history all through her prime-time and the glorious seasons of the mid-1990s, the pair of them pushing the limits of training sessions, till finally she all but broke into pieces, that history needed more than just a final text message, no matter how poignantly apposite the content. Not to be, not to be.

"There were going to so many people there, everyone who knew him so well, all to be together in one place - that was hard to miss. People like Frank (O'Mara) and Marcus (O'Sullivan) and Bob Kennedy, all those people I have been close with and have grown apart from.

"I don't see them as much now and when Kim went I could see how he'd tied us all together. He was blunt, but he was a people person. He knew everyone in a quiet way. He had so many people he could call up and get favours off or help from because they respected him. It's the same office, but now it's not Kim calling up, not the same."

Her Dad travelled. Tina too.

Kim was buried on Sonia's birthday.

From that dull, tear-stained Wednesday in late November to here is, on the one hand a journey of a million miles, and, on the other, a matter of fleeting winter weeks. Morning times now and Sophie sleeps in her cot. Nick grabs the coffee and Sonia burrows under the duvet, always looking for that extra half-hour. Ciara pads in gently, prises her sleeping sister's eyeballs open. "Sophie! Are You Awake?" So it begins, so it rolls on.

The routines of training and the demands of life as a professional runner re-asserted themselves quickly. In January, she went to altitude at Falls Creek. Just two weeks into her return to training, Sonia realised quickly that it was too much too soon. The old Sonia would never have admitted that, but this year she packed up after a week and went back to Melbourne to the gym, the exercise bikes, the pool and the daily run.

She's thought about Leopardstown, and after that Balmoral in a couple of weeks when she'll face her old nemesis Gabriela Szabo on the roads for the first time. After Easter, she's off to a training camp in San Diego for three weeks. She reckons she might stay out there and run in the Nike-hosted Prefontaine meet in Oregan in early May. Beyond that, how she fares in the first Golden League race will determine the rest of the summer.

It's all dates on pieces of paper for now. At the moment, her mind can't free itself of the film she's seen of a monochrome winter day. Her head retains the grainy memory of many people gathered in black coats, their bodies angled against the wind and the rain. They huddle on the grass and let the emotion flow. One of those defining moments.

"I don't remember John (Treacy) winning. I saw the tapes with Gerald Hartmann (physiotherapist) a few years ago. I used to ask Gerald where in Limerick did it all take place and he produced a tape of the race. I watched and it was unbelievable. It was really dark, like something from the bible. Muddy. Wet. Everyone wearing black coats, there was no colour at all except John's vest.

"It's like a black and white movie and, at the end, everyone comes in and converges on the finish like at the end of a stage of the Tour de France. There's hardly enough space for him to slip through to actually win. And it all seemed to be no big deal. I don't know how anyone finished after John did.

"I spoke to John towards the end of his career about it all. He was running the odd race in England. He'd tell me stories about how it was for him, especially winning in Ireland. I thought that if I was to win it on the moon, I'd be just as happy. It's just a bonus not having to travel back from the moon to celebrate, I suppose."

She's at that stage now when the pieces of all those conversations and relationships that made her the runner she is have all fallen together. She takes the opposite part in conversations with Craig Mottram or Georgie Clarke or whoever. Tells that old athletic truth. Time never stops being the enemy.

Yesterday, she went to lunch with the Irish Villanova Alumni Chapter. Marcus O'Sullivan, now the men's coach at her old college, was there. She'd been looking forward to seeing him for quite some time.

There's something about Marcus, always up, always positive, always beating back time. She takes his mood and makes it her own. Way back, Marcus O'Sullivan was one of the first Irish athletes to take Sonia under his wing.

She remembers at the Barcelona Olympics, 10 years ago, he took her aside and told her about time.

"He told me it was like that television programme, The Generation Game, where everything goes past on the conveyor belt. Races are like that and life is like that, opportunities going past all the time and all you can do is reach out and grab as many as you can, or they pass you by and you never see them again.

"So now I reach out and grab every opportunity. I'm looking for every last one I can grab. You get to my age and you realise everything you're doing, well you've done it before and now every time might be the last time. So you go and enjoy it."

She will. She's hoping for a nice day. As she gets older the rain makes her miserable. She's run in plenty of miserable weather, done what she had to do but she'd rather not. "If Kim is listening somewhere, well that's the sort of thing he'll be into fixing. A stiff breeze and then some sun for 20 minutes."

And one last clock-stopper of an afternoon, because she won't walk towards the quiet times wearing a hatful of regrets.