Last year she had a full winter’s training and improved to 2:02. This winter she’s worked extremely hard, and what she did in Budapest wasn’t a surprise to me. It’s the cumulative effect of the training she’s put in.”What Harewood did in Budapest was no surprise to herself either – and no fluke. “She’s a former sprinter who’s returned to running after having her children,” one leading official told the press. It was news to Harewood, who was shocked and amused in equal measure to discover she had become “a mother”.For the record, she has never had any children, and the pregnant pause in her life as a track runner stretched all the way from her success in the district 80m race as an 11-year-old primary- school pupil in Birmingham to the night she turned up at Corby Athletics Club as a 28-year-old novice.”It was immediately apparent that Karen’s a talented runner,” Charlie O’Connell, her coach at the Northamptonshire club, recalled.

Now 30, the former policewoman and local-government official stands third in the world indoor rankings for 800m.
Running for an England team in Budapest nine days ago, she won against international opposition in 2min 00.53sec, a performance that ranks her third on the UK all-time indoor list – behind Holmes (1:59.21) and Jo Fenn (1:59.50), and ahead of such luminaries as Kirsty Wade and Diane Modahl, both Commonwealth champions at 800m.It was little wonder that the talk at trackside at the Norwich Union International in Glasgow the next day was of just where the 30-year-old new girl had come from. The appointment of the retired Olympic 800m and 1500m champion has coincided with the emergence as a British middle-distance star in the making of Karen Harewood, who started racing on the track in the summer of 2004, aged 28. If part of her brief is to unearth some talent with 2012 in mind then perhaps she ought to be trawling the nation’s gyms searching for women pushing both the 30 mark and the pace on the treadmill. But who else would have done it? A disgruntled angler? The last thing they want is masses of baby trout getting in the way.

In addition to her part-time job, skating on thinnish ice on Saturday-night television, Kelly Holmes has embarked on a new career as the figurehead for the Government’s National School Sport Champion Initiative. The result is that Bewl, one of the few reservoirs that rears its own trout, may be forced to buy them – from an intensive fish-rearing farm.. Expect several very large pike to appear over the next year.These newly released trout have dined daily on free food Suddenly, that has stopped. When trout-fishing opens on 21 March, anglers may catcha lot of very small, hungry trout – not quite what their rescuers were intending.Perhaps the ALM are being blamed unfairly. Every fish-eating bird that hasn’t already made the journey to Sussex is planning to join the eat-all-you-can bonanza.And trout are predatory, too. Even a two-pounder (the average size for stocking these days) will dine on a 6in trout Much yummier than some spiky bug But scarier predators lurk in Bewl’s depths The fishery has a healthy pike stock Three over 40lb (about 4ft long) have been netted there. In this age of insanity we may be branded terrarists but one day we will be remembered as Selfless Warriors who dared to fight for what is right.”The trout were stock fish that would supply angling demand at the 770-acre reservoir, the largest inland lake in the South-east, for most of the year.