Catriona Baird runs 2:19:05 in Chicago to break Scottish marathon record by two minutes
Inverness 29-year-old finishes sixth in a race won in 2:14:40 and becomes the third-fastest British woman in history
Catriona Baird broke the Scottish marathon record by more than two minutes in Chicago on Sunday, running 2:19:05 to finish sixth in a race won in a time that was itself a course record, and moving to third on the British all-time list.
The 29-year-old from Inverness, who was running only her third marathon, went through halfway in 69:40 in a group of 11 and was dropped at 30km when the leaders surged. She ran the final 12km almost entirely alone, passing two fading runners in the last 3km, and crossed the line in a time that beats the Olympic qualifying standard for Los Angeles by nearly four minutes.
“I did not look at my watch from 35km because I did not want to know,” Baird said. “I knew I was slowing and I knew the record was somewhere about and I thought if I looked and it was gone I would stop. So I did not look. Then I saw the clock at the finish and I just sat down on the road.”
Baird, who was a 1500m runner until 2023 and ran her first marathon in London last spring in 2:24:51, is coached in Loughborough by Fergus Ritchie, who has coached three previous Scottish record-holders at distances from 5,000m to the marathon. He said the race had gone “better than I expected and worse than she expected, which is the right way round”.
“She wanted to stay with the group at 30km and she was right not to,” Ritchie said. “She would have run 2:22. Letting them go was the hardest thing she has done in a race and it is why she has run 2:19. She will not be running on her own for 12km in Los Angeles, I promise you.”
The previous Scottish record, 2:21:13, had stood since 2021. Only two British women have run faster than Baird, both of them in the 2000s, and the British record of 2:15:25 has stood since 2003. Ritchie said that figure was “not something we talk about” but did not say it was out of the question.
Baird, who works two days a week as a physiotherapist at a clinic in Loughborough, said she would “go home and sleep and then go back to work on Thursday”. UK Athletics said it would recommend her for a place on its Olympic podium funding programme, which would allow her to train full-time for the first time. She said she had not been asked yet, and that she quite liked the clinic.
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