Jon Barnes’ rapidly developing running career will take another big stride forward when he runs for England for the first time next month.

The 26-year-old has been selected to represent his country in the Anglo Celtic Plate, a home countries event which also incorporates the British 100K road championship for 2019.

The race takes place in Perth in Scotland on Sunday 24th March and Barnes, who runs for Cheltenham Harriers, is as you’d expect very much looking forward to the big day.

“It’s been a goal of mine for five or six years,” he admitted.

And he’d almost certainly have got there a lot sooner but for an untimely stress fracture of a foot that prevented him from running for five months.

“I’d just won the Hereford Marathon in 2015 and was hoping to kick on after that,” he said. “Then I got my injury and that knocked me back.”

Not that he took it easy while he was recovering.

“Dave Newport, a GB duathlon coach and Harriers’ endurance coach, persuaded me to get on a bicycle,” explained Barnes, who will be 27 at the end of this month.

And of course Barnes, being a top athlete, quite enjoyed the cycling and one thing led to another, so much that he represented Great Britain in the European Duathlon Championships in Spain in 2017, finishing third in his age group.

And while he has very fond memories of that event in Soria, running is very much his first love and the trip to Scotland at the end of next month can’t come soon enough.

Not that he is going there just to make up the numbers.

“I’m training really well,” he said. “I’m confident I can be competitive in Perth. Looking at the teams I think it’s the best standard competition for 10 years, I think you’ll need to run seven hours, 15 to get on the podium.”

So what’s Barnes’ target time?

“I’d like to get near the seven-hour mark,” he said. “That may be ambitious but that’s the aim.”

And if he achieves that it will be all the more remarkable because Barnes has never run more than 50K.

It was his run in the Gloucester 50K last month that earned him his selection – he finished second in a time of three hours, six minutes, 56 seconds – and readers of The Local Answer will remember that Gloucester race organiser Norman Wilson said at the time that Barnes had done enough on that run to earn an England call-up.

Wilson, who won the Berlin Marathon in 1977, was very impressed, so impressed in fact that he is now coaching Barnes ahead of next month’s big event.

And that is just the start.

“He wants to run for Great Britain at the 100K world championships in the Netherlands in 2020, that’s the long-term goal,” said Wilson, who has coached many top athletes over the years.

“He ran very well at Gloucester, he’d had a cold and a virus in the lead up to the race and he wasn’t sure he was going to run.

“He’s capable of running a lot quicker. He’s got very good endurance but there are areas of the speed aspect that I want to work on.”

That work is just starting – Wilson has only been coaching Barnes for a week or so – and he’s running a 38-mile trail race in Telford a week today and then a 10K in Cheltenham in early March.

“I like the athletes I coach to run shorter distances,” added Wilson.

Clearly it’s going to be a busy time for Barnes, a personal trainer who lives in Hereford, but it’s equally clear that he likes hard work.

Wilson says that he thinks Barnes “will perform very, very well” in Perth and, if he does, those world championships in September next year will surely be that much closer.