“As many people in this room know, sport in all its guises is about putting our bodies on the line.

Jane Tomlinson did that in a way that broke the basic rule that an athlete has to respect the body. She couldn’t. There wasn’t time. Her body was condemned by a cancer expert telling her she had mere months to live.

That was the start, not the end, to what made Jane extraordinary.

A nurse, Belinda Archer, told her not to waste time looking, or even praying for a cure because in her case there was none. The nurse had run a London marathon and saw no reason to discourage Jane from trying.

She did it, three times. She ran New York’s marathon, too, and completed the Ironman Triathlon, cycled Land’s End to John O’Groats, then Rome to home, then 4,200 miles across America. Her cause – her excuse – was to raise almost two million pounds for medical charities.

In 40 years’ covering sport around the world, I never met a braver example – man or woman – of unconquerable spirit.

To be told the end is months away, to start with no practical experience, marathons on the Jane Tomlinson scale, is beyond sport.

I will never forget our first contact. Cancer research UK gave The Sunday Times her number, and I called from a boat anchored near the Greek site of Olympia to ask if Jane was well enough to consider an interview.

Forty five minutes later, my battery almost expired, I had begun to know Jane.

I asked if pushing her body where it had never gone before, was an extreme alternative to sitting around waiting for death?

Silence for 15 seconds. Then she answered: ‘That’s exactly why I’m doing it - I was reasonably well before the cancer, now I’m poorly, but fitter in other ways. Going out and facing the challenge is me doing something rather than waiting around and feeling sorry for myself.’

You do not know Jane without knowing her family. Mike is the organiser, the man listening day and night to this woman’s fantasies, making the logistics possible.

He’s here today, with one of their daughters, Rebecca, and son Steven.

The Tomlinson’s invite any of you to run for Jane. The Sunday Times in 2004 entered 50 readers in the London Marathon, but all Jane asks beyond her grave is that people run the Leeds 10k

It will be her annual legacy.

A personal legacy was collected last week when young Steven received her CBE from Prince Charles.

‘Your mum really deserved this,’ said the Prince. And the boy, 10 years old, was too polite to say I really know that – I’ve been around the world watching mum win through.

She was 5ft 2, seven-and-a-half-stones, and with cancer in seven areas of her bones. She sometimes put off chemotherapy to go the extra miles. She was a mother, wife, paediatric radiographer, charity campaigner.

I never told her – there wasn’t time – that she helped me understand G.K Chesterton’s meaning when he wrote: ‘Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live, taking the form of a readiness to die.’”

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