After 10 kilometres of racing one another over the most treacherous of terrain on a day of severe storms the male mammals should have been taking the shelter that was available. Instead, partly at least for the entertainment of the next generation, some of them wallowed in the pond that had sprung up overnight.

All that was missing was a David Attenborough voiceover as we cast our eyes over proceedings at Callendar Park on Saturday afternoon.

“Superficially cross country runners bear considerable resemblance to the standard human being, however they are of a separate order,” he might have intoned.

“They are, unquestionably, physically superior… cerebrally, there is conflicting evidence.”

That they are part of a burgeoning human variant, pale blue of skin but wonderfully resilient and capable of extraordinary feats, was evident as Scottish Athletics boasted yesterday of a record number of finishers as well as entrants at Saturday’s National Cross Country Championships in the grounds of a baronial Falkirk country house.

No-one epitomised the spirit more than deposed champion Beth Potter, who had defied a foot injury to be part of the first women’s field to take on an identical challenge to their male counterparts.

The Rio Olympian is following a new sporting course by taking up triathlon, training with the world best Brownlee brothers, but she chirpily quipped that she had brought one of the new elements she is working on into play a bit earlier than planned.

“I went for a bit of a swim on the first lap,” she said of a fall that allowed Morag MacLarty to extend the lead she already held, going on to hint that her coach may not be ecstatic about her decision to go the distance thereafter given the extra demands the mud made of the ligaments that had been troubling her ahead of the event.

The morning’s conditions underfoot and overhead had been such that organisers, extremely unusually for this particular sporting discipline, had to agonise over whether to proceed with it, athlete safety their priority, but matters such as the journeys undertaken by clubs from all over the country, including the islands, also having to be factored in.

Women’s winner MacLarty, part of a dominant groups of runners from the Central Athletics Club who won both of the senior team events in spite of star man Andrew Butchart opting for a day on the sidelines, said she and team-mates Lyndsay Morrison and Jennifer Whetton had, like the officials, spent the morning wondering whether or not conditions were too severe.

Indeed she jokingly observed that their hopes of a cancellation had been raised when Whetton found a photograph on Twitter of that temporary water feature formed by the overnight rains and that this had been a particularly bad year for equality to kick in with the extension of the women’s race to 10K to match the distance covered by the men.

In more serious vein the 31-year-old dentist was evangelistic about her club and the support she has received generally but most particularly from boyfriend and fellow Central athlete Lewis Miller; about the benefits of sport in general; and about the current state of the nation, pointing out just how tough it will be to get to a second Commonwealth Games in the Gold Coast having competed when they were last in Australia in 2006.

“It’s crazy,” she enthused.

“I don’t know what event I’m going for because the 5K is absolutely stacked. It’s going to be harder to get into the Gold Coast 2018 team than it was to get in the 2016 Olympic team because all of them were Scots… Stef Twell, Eilish McColgan, Laura Whittle and then you’ve got Laura Muir who’s absolutely amazing and Beth might do the 5K, although she’s trying triathlon. It’s absolutely unreal, so I don’t know, I might try the steeplechase. You’ve got to go for whatever you can do.”

The steeliness with which she overcame having also felt out of sorts – “This morning I was feeling awful. I was absolutely in tears thinking I can’t believe this is happening today,” – suggests that even as she begins to approach the veteran category, MacLarty is capable of finding a way of getting there, not least because she has had as long an injury-free run as she can remember, to the extent that she has had to guard against burn out in her training.

“Days like this make up for the bad ones,” she said.

“Lewis was saying in the car ‘just enjoy it,’ and the downs do make the highs a lot better. Years and years and years ago I won the European Juniors 1500 and I just thought everything was going to be so smooth after that. I just thought ‘this is the start’ and it’s been the opposite. It’s been downhill with wee uphills now and again.”

The men’s race was, of course, won in 2016 champion Butchart’s absence by a fellow Olympian with whom he has a growing rivalry, Kilbarchan’s Callum Hawkins making as light as anyone could of the conditions in slithering clear early on to put on an exhibition of cross country running after making a late call on whether to race.

“I didn’t really decide until 10 o’clock this morning. If it was going to be minging weather it would probably have taken too much out of me,” he noted.

It looked as if it took a heck of a lot more out of a fair few on a day when, with the age group races starting at under-13, while some of those contesting the main events looked as if they were in their seventies, every finisher was entitled to feel triumphant.

Sport at it’s very best. The elite mixing with the masses. A handsome reward for those who had the courage to challenge the elements and decree that the show must go on.