In the 37th running of the Logan, Jones, who had previously won the race in 2002 and 2006, had just 18 seconds to spare from Shevahn Healy, who ripped 6.25 minutes off her one recorded outing with the club at this time last year. Michael Jamieson returned to form to be just another 13 seconds away in third place.

Jones, a one-time regular at Halls Gap, training long and hard, now does most of his pre-race preparation on a treadmill, but he designed the Logan course and knew every water trap, and there were plenty of those to muddy the unwary.

“I didn’t think I was going to catch Shevahn for a while,” he said.

“Every time I got close to her she seemed to pull away and in the end I was surprised she finished so close.”

Before the start, Healy said she was no chance of emulating her win at the Concongella Vineyards just three races earlier.

“I haven’t had a run since the Gold Coast Marathon last week,” she said.

But the stamina she gained from that gruelling event carried her for a long way in the Logan.

Last start winner, Sue Blizzard, who gave moral support to her good friend Healy on the Gold Coast and ran the last 10 kilometres with her, bombed out this time to finish at the tail of the field.

The club returns to Ararat on Sunday for the 10-kilometre Garry and Pauline Jenkins Handicap, which starts at 9.45am from the Ararat trotting track. Fun runners are offered free entry.

If the Stan and Karen Watson five-kilometre handicap was a horse race, the whimsical Irishman Sven O’Flynn would have started at odds of 100-1.

In seven starts with the Stawell Amateur Athletic Club this season, O’Flynn’s form was inglorious to say the least; 11th, last, 13th, then an improving seventh and eighth, before a miserable 16th and an ignominious last at his most recent start when he was lucky to finish before dark.

Clearly the handicaps favoured him. It had been two years since the 49-year-old had won a race, a three-kilometre scamper through the Ironbarks, but no one gave him any hope on Saturday.

He began the race with an ungainly shuffle, in board shorts and a jumper of some description tied around his waist. With 500 metres to run he’d beaten off fellow front-markers, Naomi Hunter, Gary Saunders and Naomi Hunter and that was a surprise in itself, but Matilda Iglesias – no fitter runner in the club – was closing fast and seemed certain to catch him.

The unlikely leader got desperate, threw off his jumper somewhere into the bushes and found another gear – a sort of stumbling kind of sprint that enabled him to stagger across the line just two seconds ahead of Iglesias in the season’s biggest upset.