I covered the first Championships, which were brilliantly incorporated into the 1992 Great North Run between Newcastle upon Tyne and South Shields - and recall its importance to the Scot who became the first women’s champion.

The previous year, Liz McColgan had won the world 10,000 metres title in the steamy heat of Tokyo, but her expected Olympic challenge in Barcelona had failed to materialise as she had suffered breathing difficulties.

In her post-race press conference McColgan revealed that she had been anaemic, and had since rectified her metabolism.

"This was the first race I've really tested myself in since Barcelona," she said.

For the woman who took over the British banner from McColgan in terms of women’s marathon running, Paula Radcliffe, the World Half Marathon Championships enabled her to make her global breakthrough after years of near misses on the track.

Radcliffe won the 2000 World Half Marathon title in Veracruz in Mexico and retained it the following year on the home roads of Bristol.

 A Championship record of 1 hour 06min 47sec launched the Briton on what would be a rich run of success on the roads, culminating in a world marathon record in 2003 and a world title two years later.

Radcliffe completed a hat-trick of wins in Vilamoura in 2003, thus matching the record of Kenya’s Tegla Loroupe, a previous marathon world record holder, who won successive titles from 1997 to 1999.

The Netherlands’ naturalised Kenyan runner Lornah Kiplagat effectively matched those performances with three successive wins, the first two of which, in 2006 and 2007, was named the IAAF World Road Running Championships.

The paramount performer in the IAAF World Half Marathon history, however, is Eritrea’s Zersenay Tadese.

Tadese won a bronze medal in the 2004 Olympic 10,000m, and silver in the 2009 world 10,000m final, as well as the World Cross Country title in 2007. But what has defined his career is his performance at these Championships, where he won a record five titles between 2006 and 2012 - two being World Road Running Championships honours.

To put that achievement in context, the list of winners since the event began in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1992 includes Olympic champions such as Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia, Khalid Skah of Morocco and Stefano Baldini of Italy, as well as former world 10,000m champion Moses Tanui of Kenya, the first man to run a half marathon in less than an hour.

But other than Tadese, only two men have won more than one individual gold medal.

Kenya’s Paul Tergat, now President of the Kenyan National Olympic Committee, was victorious in 1999 and 2000.

And in Valencia it is another Kenyan seeking to establish the latest winning run in the men’s event as Geoffrey Kamworor, winner of the last two titles in 2014 and 2016, goes after a hat-trick.

Kamworor, who has also won the last two World Cross Country titles, won the Kenyan cross trials last month but eschewed running at last weekend’s African Cross Country Championships in Algeria in order to concentrate on Saturday’s race.

The Kenyan’s first win, in Copenhagen two years ago, occurred in a race re-embracing the populist dynamic of the very first running of these Championships in 1992.

As McColgan stepped on to the podium by the finish line in South Shields, she was applauded by the slow streams of runners from the estimated 30,000 field - by this point featuring the odd gorilla-mask and silly hat - still making their way down the official channels towards the North Sea and the promise of official tee-shirts proclaiming their participation in a World Championship event.

The 1992 Championships model has been repeated in the last two editions of the Championships - Copenhagen 2014 and Cardiff 2016.

The 2018 version in Valencia will follow suit, with an expected blend of elite performers and 15,000 recreational runners. As IAAF President Sebastian Coe comments: "Does any other global sport offer the general public the opportunity to compete at its World Championships?"

One of the race slogans for Saturday is:  "The fastest course ever seen in Valencia".

As Coe observes, that is a "bold and exciting claim" considering that, on another circuit through Valencia, Kenya’s Joyciline Jepkosgei took one second off her own world record to win the city’s annual IAAF Gold Label road race last October in 64min 51sec.

The course has been specially designed for this event, starting next to the City of Arts and Sciences and finishing on a boardwalk over water, and it will provide the swiftest of routes along wide avenues without any sharp bends.

It’s all set to be a day of personal bests, from top to bottom…