The future politician remembers the European Indoor Championships in Budapest in March 1988 when he won 400m silver in a Scottish record of 45.98.

The big breakthrough year for me was 1986, going to the European Championships and going full-time as an athlete. But then 1987 was the first year I didn’t feel I progressed, despite going to the world championships in Rome. It was a real struggle.

So, when I went into the following winter, knowing it was an Olympic year, I trained like a beast. I took all of that frustration and just trained and that's when I really learned to be an athlete at the upper level. Even between training sessions, I was absolutely on top of things.

We decided to run indoors, because of what happened in 1987. I wanted to get into a better race mode. I couldn't work out how I'd run 45.9 until I looked at my training diaries, because I knew I hadn't done any speed work. When I looked back, one of my big sessions used to be five sets of 300m, one minute recovery, then 150m with six minutes recovery. That was one of my core sessions repeated through the winter.

To get the target time for your 150m, you would take two seconds off the 300m time and half it. I was running 36 seconds for the 300m and 16 for the 150m, which is 48 seconds 400m pace. Then, a minute later, I was running 46 seconds pace. I was rocking.

I was not very quick, but I learned then what my strength was: my ability to run in lactic. I wasn’t like some of the really great athletes, like Roger Black and Derek Redmond, who had speed to burn. I didn't have that, but I could run close to the red line and so my training had increased my speed endurance with an intense tempo. That's really what I was doing across 12-15 training sessions a week – I just had Saturday off – and it was because ’87 was such a shock to me.

I started the indoor season by opening up at the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow at an international between Great Britain and France. It was the first time an individual Scottish record had been broken in the Kelvin Hall. I didn't dare not win that race. I think if I'd lost that, they might have invaded the pitch!

I then went down to the UK Championships with a cold and ended up getting beaten. Fortunately, I still got picked for the European Indoors but, when I went out to Budapest, we hadn't interrupted winter training at all. We just kept ploughing through what we were doing. We were racing off training, using the races themselves as the speed work.

Budapest had incredible architecture and it was a wonderful place but, when you went behind the Iron Curtain, it was very different. When you went to these championships, they’d have big buffets and all sorts of different types of food in there, but it was freezing cold – wet, dark, dank. We basically went back and forth to the indoor arena for training but we never went outside, just because we were not sure how safe it was.

Running the heats, semis and finals of the Europeans, I lowered the Scottish record in each round – 46.93 seconds in the heat, then 46.86 in the semi-final when I beat out the world record-holder, Thomas Schönlebe. 

I didn't know he wasn't going to run in the final. I like to think I scared him. It's probably highly unlikely but that's my story. I think he tweaked something in the warm-up. That's the story that came round. But I was always going to run the way I ran. I was blood and thunder indoors because you have to get to the break line in a good spot.

I still got beaten by Jens Carlowitz, another East German – enough said, given the era – but 45.98 was quick and there were good athletes behind me. It was the seventh-fastest time ever.

The rest of the boys in the British squad at the time, including Kriss Akabusi and Roger Black, were in America training in California at the time. When the news got over to them that I'd done 45-nine, everybody was checking it to make sure it was right. That was the run that really catapulted me into the top rungs of the sport.

I remember saying to my coach, Hugh Muir: “We did it.” It was actually him and I and my training partners. As much as I loved the other British guys, loved running with them and I love the fact I've got relay medals, it was nice to get something as an individual. We did that, and my team did that.

As told to Mark Woods