IT’S easy to overlook the influence of your younger experiences. I often forget that the first articles I ever wrote for a newspaper weren’t opinion pieces or political news. For a while, when I was around 13 years old, I filed the athletics reports for my local paper.

Unavoidably, those were the events in Rio to which I’ve been glued over the past fortnight. Many of the same athletes that I wrote about or ran against, over a decade later, are now at the pinnacle of their sporting careers.

Scotland had a record 15 members of the GB track and field team. They did not disappoint. Five team members finished in the top ten in their events, including a historic bronze for sprint-hurdler Eilidh Doyle as part of the GB 4x400m relay team.

This represented the first track medal for a Scottish athlete at an Olympic Games since Seoul 1988.

Personally, it was the middle- and long-distance athletes that impressed me the most. I am biased, though. I remember all those mornings of freezing cold runs for mile after mile on wet grass and excruciating hill repeats up Gardner Street. It’s tough.

The mixture of aerobic and anaerobic exercise challenges both your physical endurance and the ability to keep going as lactate acid floods your legs in the later stages.

The conventional wisdom for a generation is that runners from the Great Rift Valley – through Kenya and Ethiopia – are nearly unbeatable, partly due to the advantages of altitude training. But Scottish athletes managed to mix it with the best of them this year, with a promise of more to come.

Andy Butchart, Dunblane’s third Olympian behind the Murray brothers, came an impressive sixth in the 5000m final – again breaking the national record. This achievement was all the more remarkable as Butchart is new to training as a full-time athlete.

Likewise, Lynsey Sharp wasn’t far off the medals in the 800m – also breaking her own national record. Compatriots Laura Muir (1500m) and Callum Hawkins (marathon) also pushed themselves to the front of their respective Olympic finals, finishing seventh and ninth respectively.

I vaguely remember racing against Hawkins in track competitions almost ten years ago, although I think I only really saw him at the start and finish line. Given he’s now one of the world’s best marathon runners – despite only racing the distance three times – I think that’s fair enough in hindsight.

The dedication required to perform at this level is huge. Training more than 10 times a week, structuring your diet, work and study around performance, as well as avoiding the drinking and partying that young people usually embrace are all necessary sacrifices. With the development of sports science, athletes now add ice baths, altitude training, and all sorts of technical add-ons to improve performance.

These sporting-obsessed lifestyles may seem detached from most people’s daily lives. Questions naturally follow over whether elite sport deserves its level of public funding in comparison to other priorities, like grassroots sport to widen public participation.

The latter does become more important once the carnival of competition calms down. Personally, I believe there is no area of public life more in need of greater investment than sports facilities and access. That’s nothing to do with high-profile success. It’s a health and inequality issue – that is currently starved of cash.

Support for sports facilities and free access can improve public health, reducing the cost pressures on the NHS. The fact that this approach, properly focused, would also help those with the least the most is an even greater incentive.

One of my most tragic memories growing up was watching my school playing fields ripped apart then corned off to make way for a snails-pace housing development. The council made millions of pounds from the land sale, but now the community has less public land on which to play sport.

In a country with 13,000 hectares of derelict land, there is a great opportunity to reverse that decline and transform wastelands into sports pitches. Once again, that derelict land is concentrated in communities with the highest levels of poverty and lowest life expectancies.

Cuningar Loop, for instance, covered 15 acres of wasteland by the Clyde between Rutherglen and Dalmarnock. Through a redevelopment project the area is now open – and includes sport and woodland areas. That’s urban land reform in action.

There’s been greater progress in Glasgow and Edinburgh over development of new city cycle routes – which form part of a national plan to develop "active travel". Having visited some of continental Europe’s most bike-friendly cities, there’s still a long way to go. Like sport investment, these type of projects have multiple benefits: improving health, making the roads safer for cyclists, and reducing pollution.

Rio 2016 – like its London and Glasgow equivalents before it – was a spectacular of sporting success. The real test, however, is how sport can be an opportunity for all. That’s the legacy that we can create.

Michael Gray @GrayInGlasgow