LONDON was really the only place for Ross Houston to be on Sunday but, unlike two of his potential marathon rivals for a place in Scotland's Commonwealth Games team, he was covering the course by tube.

There was no question of him taking some dubious short-cut across the course to beat them around the capital but it seemed a curious way for the 34-year-old from Roslin to spend such a potentially important day in his career.

However, having already posted a time which meets the criteria last year, Houston was faced with the sort of dilemma commonplace for those participating in this most tricky of sporting disciplines when it came to what had been designated the last qualifying event for Scottish athletes.

The treacherous nature of marathon running could not have been better exemplified than the way that, even as he broke the English record, one of the great athletes of the modern era, the double Olympic and world champion Mo Farah, felt he struggled to cope with the expectation of making his debut over the distance.

The choice facing Houston had been stark, then. Sit it out and watch helplessly as others had a crack at beating the time he set in Frankfurt in October - 2 hours 18 minutes 28 seconds, more than half-a-minute inside the target time to make the Scotland team - or run and take the risk of taking too much out of his legs when, ideally, he is aiming to gear his preparation towards the race in Glasgow.

In the end, he came up with the compromise of making the trip to the capital but only as a spectator, working his way around with his wife Claire. "We came up with a way of getting round the course, so we were at the start, then at the Cutty Sark, then Canary Wharf and then at the finish," he said.

"It might seem a strange thing to do but it was going to be a nervous wait anyway because I knew when I posted that time that there were a lot of opportunities in between for others to go faster.

"It says in the selection criteria that the qualifying period ends two days after the London Marathon so I had entered it and we had booked up to go. We've got friends down there, too, so we just decided to make the trip and watch the race."

A week earlier, Martin Williams, who represented Scotland at the last Commonwealth Games in Delhi, made his final bid and missed out narrowly in the Manchester Marathon. Yet, with a maximum of three places for marathon runners in the Scotland team, Houston knew that both Andrew Douglas and Neil Renault, who were running in London, had the potential to produce runs that could force the issue.

With Derek Hawkins already selected, it meant that Houston, who has run for Scotland in cross country and on the road but has never really contended for a major Games, could have been forgiven for hoping for the best for one of them as an individual, but not for both.

Yet the sense of camaraderie that exists among those who put themselves through the gruelling regimes required to run marathons at that sort of pace meant he did nothing but wish them well.

"It's a slightly unusual situation in sport because it's all very good spirited," explained Houston, after watching both Douglas and Renault run well in the early stages of Sunday's race without ultimately managing to get under the 2hr 19min benchmark.

"You know all your rivals and you are friendly with the majority of them so you don't want anyone to have a bad run. If they had beaten my time I would have been there to shake their hands, so while I was happy that I wasn't shoved down the rankings I was disappointed for the others."

There speaks a runner who has been around for long enough to understand fully the pain of his event and who has consequently seen this year as representing a particular opportunity.

Now, some five years since he decided to take on the distance, Houston believes he finally has the right combination of experience and conditioning.

While the nervous wait will continue until the team announcement, Houston can take comfort from knowing he has done everything he possibly could without jeopardising his prospects of running his best at the Games should the opportunity arise.

"The nature of the marathon is that you can only run a certain number of them so I believe I did the right thing, because if I do get selected for the team then in the longer term it will be beneficial not to have run London," he said.