Since the spread of the deadly New Coronavirus began earlier this year, athletes, like everyone else, have been forced to adjust. First, those things directly related to their athletic pursuits: their schedules, their training, their travel. As the virus continued to spread across the planet, those adjustments moved from the professional to the personal and are now impacting on most aspects of their lives -where and when they can eat and shop, who they can see and who they can't – just like the rest of us.

Britain’s Steph Twell overhauled European champion Lonah Chemtai Salpeter to win the European 10,000m Cup in London on Saturday (6) while Italy’s Yemaneberhan Crippa timed his finish well to win the men’s race.

Building upon the laurels he collected in the U20 and U23 ranks, Yemaneberhan Crippa won his first medal at the senior level when he finished third in the 10,000m at the European Championships in Berlin’s historic Olympic Stadium in August. When he crossed the finish line, his expression suggested that it wouldn’t be the last the 22-year-old rising Italian star would earn.

Turkish clubs won three of the four team titles on offer while Yemaneberhan Crippa and Irene Cheptai took the individual senior honours at the European Cross Country Clubs Cup, which doubled as this year’s Almond Blossom Cross Country IAAF Cross Country Permit meeting in Albufeira, Portugal, on Sunday (5).

A showdown between Kate Avery and Fionnuala McCormack in a highly competitive women’s race at the Antrim International Cross Country promises to be the highlight of the IAAF Cross Country Permit meeting in Greenmount on Saturday (16).

Sifan Hassan and Ali Kaya delivered dominant performances to win the senior titles at the European Cross Country Championships in the French town of Hyeres on Sunday (13).

You have to go back to 1991 for the last time an athlete from somewhere other than Kenya or Ethiopia won the world cross country junior men’s title, but Uganda might have the man to end this quarter century-long dominance at the IAAF World Cross Country Championships, Guiyang 2015 in the shape of Joshua Cheptegei.

You have to go back more than 30 years to find the last European runner who stood on the podium after the junior men’s race at the IAAF World Cross Country Championships – when Spain’s Pere Casacuberta won in 1984 – so it has to be a very long shot that Italy’s Yemaneberhan Crippa will end that streak in Guiyang, China, next March.

Silver became gold for both Polat Kemboi Arikan and Gemma Steel as last year’s runners-up stepped up to the top spot of the podium at the European Cross Country Championships in the Bulgarian skiing resort of Samokov on Sunday (14).