SHE is there and I am there, howling with laughter, leaning against the track railings, unable to hold myself up.

I can’t remember what Janice said but I remember it was because she was doing something daft. And also showing us the beautifully intricate tattoos she had done at the Commonwealth Games in Australia.

It’s sunny, the track holds heat, warmth radiating up at you when you sit on it. The only tell that this isn’t a normal training session is that it’s out of Red Star club hours so we’ve got Glasgow’s Crownpoint track to ourselves.

Rain or shine Janice spends her Monday and Thursday evenings coaching there and now she was spending the other days of the week with us too.

I had a vision of what the rest of my life could be like – warm tracks and laughter and merciless training sessions.

Right now though, RaceRunning is stuck. It has the title of “Paralympic sport” but will have no medal event in Tokyo and no funding. We are given trial events by the IPC so we can convince them we are an elite performance sport. In a few weeks we will head out to one of these – the 2018 Berlin Europeans – the first IPC- level race RaceRunning has been included in, and having Janice on hand so much was a treat due to the calibre of this race.

It cut my soul as keenly as anything ever has: “Hannah, Janice has died”. The echo might be a permanent feature in my head now. It was only last Sunday and a small part of me is expecting her to rock up at my competition this weekend or just be late texting me my next session or late texting me another encouraging message about trying to make it in the cycling world or late texting me a message about how she’d made my team-mates vomit with her latest session.

The late Janice Eaglesham MBE, she didn’t have a reputation for being last minute, she didn’t have any problem giving anyone as much as they needed.

Sometimes writing is an impossibly cruel conjuring trick that might bring someone back so absolutely, only to tear them from you, without warning, at the page break.

I’d never been to Janice’s house, not like Kayleigh Haggo, to make pizzas and test out the new couch in front of the telly.

Not like Sammi Kinghorn, who was an almost permanent feature there, whether in a picture on the mantelpiece, or in person, and who Janice and husband Ian Mirfin had travelled the world with – from the Rio Paralympics to the Gold Coast and Commonwealth Games.

Not like Gavin Drysdale, who had known her since he was impossibly young.

Not like Ian, her soulmate of 33 years who I’d probably not tell apart from Janice, really, if it weren’t for Ian’s rude jokes that Janice would immediately admonish.

The fact I was no longer a regular at Red Star made no difference at all. She has had such a profound impact on my life that I have to ensure she goes out as a well-sung hero (she already received the Unsung Hero award in 2011).

Janice was the first person to coach RaceRunning seriously like the competitive sport it is now. She remembers saying yes to a race for Gavin. When most people hear about someone with significant cerebral palsy having a go at our sport of RaceRunning, they think about recreation and about fun. But when Janice saw Gavin run so fast, with so much professionalism for a child, she knew he was going to steal the show and all the world records.

Janice was my first introduction to sport, like she was for Gavin. For a good year I thought all coaches were this mesmerising mix of wellbeing-led belief in an athlete’s abilities combined with an encouragement and fierce determination.

For the Europeans, Janice badly wanted to print personalised T-shirts for us all with the phrase “Race-Runners run for fun”. I was against this saying that if that was the front, the back would have to be “and glory and medals and the joy in others’ defeat” so much have I been moulded in the UKSport gold-medal furnace.

Yet, Janice’s attitude was exactly what my team-mates and I needed to keep developing the sport, our times and our elite performance.

RaceRunning is a sport which is more than 27 years old but for the first 18 or so of those it was never developed as a performance sport in any country, until it came to Scotland and Janice Eaglesham.

When RaceRunning got taken on as a Paralympic sport other nations got more serious but Janice remained the one expert on training individuals with significant co-ordination impairment. In fact, she was the only person British Para athletics could think of to lead the RaceRunning team. Perhaps she is still the only one.

A coach who is not intimidated by disability is hard to find. There are ones who deny it entirely – coaches who put more emphasis on dysfunctional legs trying to complete an able-bodied programme. There are ones that let it distract them – health and safety centric coaches who won’t push at all, sure that we will break.

Janice was the goldilocks centre – a coach who never let disability dominate but wasn’t afraid to let it lead. She also coached for free, ceaselessly and tirelessly. She even bought me socks with bicycles on for Christmas.

Even more rare was her acceptance of my choice to try to make it to the Tokyo Paralympics with cycling, with no funding opportunity there for RaceRunning but helping me to maintain my performances in the 100m and winning golds for as long as I could.

Janice was commitment itself without any pondering about exactly how much life she was giving to others and what could be kept for herself.

It is a tragedy she is gone because she should have had so many years ahead of her. She should have got to see RaceRunning’s first Para athletics World Championships and maybe even first Paralympic Games in 2024, which would be, in large part, down to her.

In the loss of Janice I hope there isn’t a loss of her ethos. I hope more coaches and individuals working within disability sport can find what she did and continue what she worked so hard for.

Now we grieve because we owe her that. Her funeral is on Wednesday and Ian’s told everyone to come in brightly-coloured sports attire. South Lanarkshire crematorium really doesn’t know what’s coming.