Brendan Foster in his running pomp - winning the 5,000m in a 1977 international match against Russia at Crystal Palace ©Hulton Archive/Getty Images

On September 7 this year the Great North Run, which Foster set up in 1981, will celebrate its one millionth finisher. And by 2020 he has targeted involving another million people in running regularly.

To reach that new figure, he hopes to have 350,000 people taking part in his nationwide series of Great Runs, half a million using a digital resource called Great Run Training to plan their training using their smartphone and a further 300,000 running in free weekly Great Run Local training events.

"It took us 33 years to go from zero to one million in the Great North Run. In the next five years we want to get one million more. Then by 2020, we expect to have one million running annually in our programmes," says Foster, who is seeking a new commercial partner to replace Bupa once their 21-year involvement with his events ceases in 2015.

The Great North Run, set up by Brendan Foster in 1981, will become the first event of its kind to celebrate a millionth finisher this year ©Getty Images

"We are in discussion with several very high profile businesses who want to be involved in mass participation sport and people achieving their dreams," he says, adding that he expects there to be an announcement to coincide with the launch of this year's Great North Run.

"Each of our events will have a programme around it called Big Run Local," he adds. "The objective of Great Run Local is to get people from nothing to a 5km run. Not a guy who runs every day, but a guy who thinks he can't do it.

"The other mission that I'm really passionate about is targeting more women. In the first Great North Run 11 per cent of the finishers were women. Over the first one million it has increased to 36 per cent. Beyond this year's Great North Run I want the next one million to be 50/50."

As far as this 66-year-old former chemistry teacher is concerned, sporting inspiration comes in two main forms.

"Events like the Great North Run and the London Marathon are inspirational in a practical way," he says. "At the top end of the racing you have athletes of the calibre of Mo Farah and Haile Gebrselassie running. But behind them you have a mass of other runners, just ordinary runners, and people can look at them and say to themselves 'I can do that'.

"When you look at how the Great North Run has grown over the last 33 years, it's not just a statistic, it's a movement.

"The Olympics are emotionally inspirational. After the London 2012 Games there wasn't the infrastructure set up to capture all of the Olympic legacy. But they have provided inspiration to people in many, many areas, particularly in cycling and running.

"That's what the Olympics did in 2012. And that's what they did for me in 1960."

Foster vividly recalls the experience of watching those Rome 1960 Olympics on television as a 12-year-old. His recollection of Herb Elliott's 1,500m victory is expressed in terms of the phrase the BBC's commentator David Coleman used to describe it - "the best in the world runs away from the rest of the world."  Clearly it was not just athletics that got imprinted onto the young Foster at that time, as his subsequent 30-year career as an athletics commentator for BBC indicates.

But if Elliott's world record run of 3:35.6 still resonates with Foster, the image which still carries the most intensity is that of Ethiopia's Abebe Bikila running barefoot towards the Olympic marathon title, his progress in a race begun in the evening to avoid the worst of the stifling summer heat dramatised by flaming torches borne by soldiers lining the route and the constant light trained upon him from the vehicle bearing television cameras.

Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia en route for the marathon title at the Rome 1960 Olympics, pursued by Morocco's Abdesselam Rhadi. His barefoot exploits inspired a 12-year-old Foster, watching on television, to become a runner ©Hulton Archive/Getty Images



Bikila crossed the finish line at the Arch of Constantine in a world record of 2:15:16, becoming the first black African to win an Olympic gold medal. Asked why he had run without shoes, he responded: "I wanted the world to know that my country, Ethiopia, has always won with determination and heroism."

Foster remembers: "The sight of this barefoot soldier running along the Appian Way at night, with soldiers holding torches along the route..it was fairytale stuff. No one knew anything about him...

"I remember thinking to myself when I saw it, 'that's what I want to do. I want to be a runner.'"

Foster had his wish, eventually running in three Olympics - 1972, 1976, where he took bronze in the 10,000m, and 1980. He also took Commonwealth 5,000m silver behind Kenya's Ben Jipcho at the 1974 Games in Christchurch, and Commonwealth 10,000m four years later in Edmonton.

"When people talk about Olympic legacy, it is generated by Olympic inspiration. As far as I was concerned, it was watching those Olympics which put me on course to become an athlete rather than a footballer."

Foster also recalls how he persuaded Chris Brasher, then athletics correspondent of The Observer after a career which had seen him help pace Roger Bannister to the Four Minute Mile before winning the 1956 Olympic 3,000m steeplechase title, to follow the Commonwealth marathon at the 1978 Edmonton Games on the lead vehicle.

That race, Foster believes, quickened Brasher's interest in the marathon as a distance, and when the journalist went off to run the New York marathon the following year the sporting inspiration - there it is again - of witnessing and being involved in a mass road race translated itself into the audacious determination to create a similar event in England's capital.

Two years later, on March 29, 1981, Brasher and former Welsh athlete John Disley presented to the world the first London Marathon. In June of that year, the first Great North Run took place as Foster's own plans to involve ordinary people in running came to fruition.

Chris Brasher, co-founder of the London Marathon, cradles a cup that cheers after running the first London race in 1981 ©Hulton Archive/Getty Images



But if the two huge powerhouses of mass sporting inspiration continue in rude health, what, one wonders, does Foster make of the current shape of athletics within the Olympics?

After making it very clear that he is speaking as no more than a keenly interested observer, Foster says he would like to see more events included in the Games.

"I was talking about this with Michael Johnson when we were working for the BBC last year," he says. "It didn't seem fair that you could only win one or two Olympic titles in a given year. If you were Mo Farah, it was the 5,000 and 10,000m. Of if you were Usain Bolt, you could get three including the relay.

"These guys don't have the chance to become Olympic legends like the swimmer Michael Phelps, who has got the all-time record of 18 Olympic golds.

"Why can't we have the 300m, or the 600m? And there are so many middle distance runners in the world who can only aim at the 5,000 or the 10,000m at any Olympics, or, if they are long distance runners, the marathon.

"What's wrong with having a 1,000m, a 2,000m and a 3,000m? What's wrong with having a half marathon Olympic title? I remember running cross country in Grenoble in snowy conditions. It was a bit frosty but it was a great race. Why can't we have an Olympic cross-country at the Winter Games?"

There was a symmetry about the fact that what was arguably Foster's greatest victory, in the 1974 European Championship 5,000m against a field which included Finland's double Olympic champion Lasse Virén, should have taken place in the city which had witnessed Bikila's triumph 14 years earlier.

The race itself saw him establishing a commanding lead as he came to the bell with a theoretical chance of breaking the then world record of 13min 13.00sec, set two years earlier by Belgium's Emiel Puttemans.

Brendan Foster starts to move clear of Finland's double Olympic champion Lasse Virén en route to European 5,000m gold in at the 1974 Rome Championships ©Getty Images

"I was in good shape that year and I knew I wanted to run a really great race," Foster remembers. "With a lap to go I had the race won and I looked at the clock and did a calculation. I knew I would have to run 57 seconds to get the record, but I thought, 'F--- it, I can't do it.' It was red-hot. The temperature was in the 90s. So I went on for the gold with a last lap of 62 seconds."

One of his other vivid memories from those European Championships has to do with his old mate Brasher, who was tasked with forming his main Sunday piece as a preview for the 5,000m final which Foster was about to run.

"Chris was a great man," Foster recalls. "No one else would have been able to do what he did in persuading the GLC and other authorities in London to accommodate the marathon.

"He was a runner, then he was in politics, then it was TV and newspapers, then it was orienteering - he was a great enthusiast for whatever held his attention.

"My wife has just been helping me sort out some old stuff at our house, and I found a copy of the piece he did on me in Rome. It was all about the good form I was in, and speculating on whether I would be in good enough shape to defeat Virén.

"I remember at one point when he was interviewing me he asked me what music I listened to before I raced. I said I didn't really. He then told me how, before he raced, he would get inspired by listening to Finlandia, the piece by Sibelius. He then described how the music went, all the different moods, the rousing start, and then the melody coming through.

"The day before my race I got a tape of Finlandia delivered to my hotel room which Chris had arranged. But we were just athletes preparing for racing - I didn't have the means of playing the tape.

"Anyway, when the article came out on the Sunday it was all about how Brendan Foster would really have a great run because of the inspiring music of Sibelius.

"I would love to have had a chance of hearing it!

"When I got him to watch the 1978 Commonwealth marathon with me, it was a great atmosphere. Filbert Bayi had already won the 1,500m gold in a world record in one of the great races, and his fellow Tanzanian athlete Gidamis Shahanga was leading the marathon. I was shouting at him 'run like Filbert!', and he did go on to win it. But that experience had an effect on Chris."

One likes to think that, had Brasher not died in 2003, he would have had an invitation to share Foster's - and the north east's - million runner landmark later this year. But while that huge figure in British sport will be sadly absent, another, Sebastian Coe, will be present.

"Seb is going to be there on the day," Foster says. "He has put on an Olympics that have been emotionally inspiring to so many thousands of people.

Sebastian Coe, seen here at the launch of the Games Makers' uniforms for the London 2012 Games, will be a special guest at this year's Great North Run, where the millionth finisher will be celebrated ©Getty Images

"So I want him to be there because he delivered an Olympics that was the most inspirational sports event we have ever had in this country. And because when he was running he was the most inspirational runner we have ever had in this country.

"When you are bringing all that down from Mount Olympus to an ordinary level with ordinary people, that's an area in which Seb is extremely comfortable.

"We have a good idea of what time the millionth runner will come through, so we know roughly when it will happen, and we will be ready. We will have a computer on hand to register the runners as they come through which will click for the millionth runner.

"We will be standing 20 metres past the line, so we will be able to see runner 1,372 or whoever it is, as they walk past.

"Although the field will be packed with runners of the calibre of Mo Farah, Haile Gebrselassie, this person will be the star of the show, even though they don't know it now. I do like that."

In the meantime, Foster has started running again with friend from across the road with whom he used to train with many years ago. He doesn't plan to run this year's Great North Run. "I will be too busy," he says. But as for future years - who knows, he might just get inspired to compete again...

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, covered the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics as chief feature writer for insidethegames, having covered the previous five summer Games, and four winter Games, for The Independent. He has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, The Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. His latest book Foul Play - the Dark Arts of Cheating in Sport (Bloomsbury £12.99) is available at the insidethegames.biz shop. To follow him on Twitter click here.