On the morning of Sunday 10 July, the final day of this year’s European Athletics Championships, the attention will focus away from the Olympic Stadium to the streets of Amsterdam.
The half marathon which has been added to the programme of the Championships will include a young woman who has distance legacy running through her veins.
Germany’s Katrin Dorre-Heinig is arguably one of Europe’s greatest marathoners, having won 17 major city races, including London on three occasions, between 1992 and 1994, along with finishing third at the Olympics in Seoul in 1988.
Now her daughter Katharina is following in her impressive footsteps, with the ambition of qualifying for the longer marathon event at this year’s Olympics Games in Rio, a few weeks after she has competed in the half marathon at the European Athletics Championships.
It was back in 2010, on her marathon debut, that Katharina, now 24, won in Cologne and she has just returned from training in Kenya, with excitement building towards 10 July.
'Amsterdam already forms a very tempting target for me,' said Heinig, speaking to leichtathletik.de.
She ran 72:55 in Barcelona in February, the third time quickest by a German this year (Anja Schneider has run 71:17 and Franziska Reng 72:33), and is hopeful it will be enough to earn her selection.
Ahead of that, Heinig, who works in the Hesse police, will be aiming for the Olympic marathon qualifying of 2:30:30 at the Zurich Marathon on 24 April.
She has thrived on being in Kenya and said: 'The training is tough, not only physically but also mentally. However, if you can get away healthy, you definitely have something on it.
'There are a lot of runners up there, all working to the same goal. It makes a lot of fun to play when you can run in a group of Kenyans or a pacemaker gets asked for hard tempo runs aside. These are benefits that are obtained nowhere else.'
Benefits which could come to fruition in the Netherlands in just over three months time.