Every race needs a starter. If you don’t have a starter then you don’t have a race, you just have a lot people in lyrca standing politely and looking at each other to see if anyone else is going to move first. That’s not a race, that’s a queue.

You need a starter. Someone to fire the pistol, sound the horn, drop the flag, or fire a smoke cannon and let off a hundred fireworks (Long Course Weekend, I’m looking at you and your extravagant start!).

The Trossachs 10K however did things a litle different. It was started by a local chef from the Forth Inn.

“Good luck,” he said, dressed in chef’s whites and still wearing his apron like he’d just wandered out of his kitchen, which he had, because the kitchen was only 20 metres from the start line.

“Why is the chef starting the race?” I asked Iain.

We couldn’t figure it out. He didn’t mention a running club, so we assume he wasn’t one of the organisers, he didn’t mention a charity, so he wasn’t one of the beneficiaries, and he didn’t plug his restaurant, so he wasn’t even looking for publicity.

We can only assume that there was a misunderstanding. Someone must have said they needed a starter and someone else thought they’d best get a chef because, if there’s one thing chefs know, then it’s starters…

It’s apt that the race was started by a chef as the only reason we were racing the Trossachs 10K was that there was a cracking butchers in town and we fancied a run then lunch from the butchers (sausage roll and a macaroni pie for me, delicious).

The race itself is run through the Queen Elizabeth forest and is mostly on trail paths. It’s a great route with some ups and downs through the forest. It was raining but not too heavily to make it uncomfortable to be out running.

I ran round with Iain, we weren’t competing against each other or looking for a time, but, at the end, I felt comfortable and sprinted the final few hundred metres. Sadly, the chef wasn’t at the finish, but, you know, no one finishes with a starter.