Late nights and Tokyo stories

It's day three at the World Athletics Championships, and what can I say ... I'm loving it already

It’s only midway through day three of the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo and already there have been so many great storylines, and so many great races, I don’t quite know where to start.

I’ll work backwards. Last night for the second night in a row I stayed up into the early hours to watch the marathon. This is risky. Firstly, because it could turn out to be a dull procession of a race. But much more than that, because you’re putting yourself at the mercy of the TV producers, who have a tendency to do stupid things when covering a marathon, such as cutting away right at the crucial moment, after you’ve already invested an hour and a half of your attention, with the race bubbling away nicely, someone poised to make a move at any moment, and then suddenly they’ve switched over to the early qualifying rounds of the hammer or something.

(If I sound bitter, it’s because I’ve been burnt staying up late to watch a marathon in the past - so much so that I even wrote an article about it for the Guardian: Missing in action: TV producers fluff coverage of men's marathon in Beijing)

Luckily, this year the world championships are in Japan, where they understand distance running, and in the end both races were covered flawlessly.

And what a pair of races they were. The men’s race followed that regular championship marathon pattern where a huge lead group run together at a decent-but-nothing-crazy pace, in hot conditions, and one by one people begin to drop away - from the air it looks like a huge bird gradually shedding its feathers.

None of the very best East African runners were in the race, as they were all targeting bigger paydays in the autumn city marathons, but the line-up was still strong. Usually in a big city marathon the elite field contains about 20 runners, but here you had about 75 elite runners from across the globe.