She is one third of the Galloping Grannies, the self-named trio of veteran runners who are such a big part of Cirencester Athletics and Triathlon Club.

Yvonne Binks has been with the club for close on 20 years and she said: “We’re all 70, but I’m the oldest. I was 70 in October.”

The other members of the 70 club are Liza Darroch, the club’s publicity officer, and Ruth Fulford, and all three remain very keen runners.

They’re also pretty good socially too and there is a big day planned in August, when the three of them will get all the grandchildren together – 10 of them at the last count! – and take them out for a run.

“The Galloping Grannies name was Liza’s idea,” said Yvonne. “I think we’re quite well known. We haven’t got any T-shirts made but I think we might for August when the grandchildren are all together, that’s a good idea.

“We won’t take the grandchildren too far, we’ll probably take them round a nearby field.”

That will be good fun of course and Yvonne has been running for fun for more than 30 years now.

“I used to live in East Grinstead in Sussex,” said Yvonne, “ and in those days I played a lot of squash.”

That’s a sport that requires a lot of running too, but it wasn’t until her late husband William, who worked in the diplomatic service, was posted to the Falkland Islands for a year that she actually took up running as a sport.

That was in 1986 and Yvonne said: “He asked me if I wanted to go to the Falklands but it wasn’t a good time. We had one son doing A-levels and another doing O-levels.

“I asked him if there were any other ladies going and he said ‘no’, so I stayed at home!”

It was a difficult time for Yvonne, obviously, but her running certainly helped the days pass more quickly until her husband returned home.

“I was feeling down and I remember switching on the TV and the London Marathon was on,” she said.

“There was this amazing guy – Steve Hill. He was paraplegic and I thought, ‘If he can do it, so can I’.”

And being the all-action lady that she clearly is, Yvonne set herself the not inconsiderable target of running in the London Marathon 12 months later in 1987.

“I told them at the squash club that that was what I wanted to do and they took me for a run up and down a hill,” she laughed. “I was exhausted!”

She realised there and then that running 26.2 miles in the most iconic distance race in the world wasn’t just something you could turn up to with a new pair of running shoes, so she joined the nearby Lingfield Running Club.

And from that day on, certainly as far as her running is concerned, she has never looked back.

“I asked the people at Lingfield to teach me how to run a marathon,” she recalled.

And the coaches there were clearly very good because Yvonne did run in the London Marathon in 1987 and completed five minutes faster than her predicted time, finishing in four hours, five minutes.

Since then she’s run another 12 marathons in England’s capital city – her fastest time was three hours, 30 minutes, 13 seconds in 1990 – as well as four others, including the Toronto Marathon.

“I ran that with my friend Maggie Elsey, who also runs for Cirencester,” said Yvonne, who used to work for a bank. “She’s Canadian and she always wanted to run that race.”

Yvonne’s most recent marathon was in Bournemouth in October which she completed in just over five hours.

And while that is still a very respectable time, Yvonne is even more proud of the fact that her marathon running has raised so much money for charity over the years.

“I’ve helped raise over £150,000,” she said with understandable pride, although it may be that she has now run her last marathon.

“I think that’s it,” she admitted. “I’ve come out unscathed. My knees are intact, my hips are intact. You’ve got to know when to quit, that’s intelligent running.”

She’s still out and about running recreationally, of course, and she runs pretty much every Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday.

She moved up to this part of the world just before the turn of the century when her husband was moved here for his work.

His work took him all over the world – Argentina, Uruguay, Hong Kong, Paraguay – so Yvonne knew what to do once she arrived in Gloucestershire.

“The first thing I did was join the local running club,” she laughed.

And she’s loved every minute of it.

“I competed for the club when I first moved here,” she added. “I competed in the Gloucestershire road races and won my age group for the first two years.”

These days she doesn’t compete although she did say she might do a 10-miler later in the year.

Clearly she still loves to run, so what is it about the sport that she likes so much?

“It’s quite a selfish sport because it’s just you,” she said, “but I love it. It’s a great leveller and when you’re out running with someone you can sort out all your problems because we talk all the time – we sort out recipes, plumbers and the best book swap shops.”

And when Yvonne isn’t running she’ll be doing all she can to make sure that others can.

“I’ll be a marshall at the club’s Summer Sizzler on Wednesday 13th June,” she said.

That’s one of Cirencester AC’s showpiece events and takes runners round the beautiful Cirencester Park.

Yvonne is happy to help because the club have played a big part in her life for the best part of two decades now.

“Yes, it has been a big feature,” said Yvonne, who is also a member of the Rotary Club of Cirencester and was their first lady president in 2015/16.

“When you have a bereavement as I did in August 2005, it is important you have something to get up for in the morning and running has done that.

“It clears your head and gets the endorphins going – it’s the feelgood factor.”