Meb Keflezighi went to put on his running vest on Sunday morning only to find that it was sopping. On Monday he appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman. It was a microcosm of the nine-year journey that American distance running has made from damp-squib status to talk of the town.

Keflezighi’s win in the New York City Marathon was the first by an American for 27 years. More remarkable still was that six of the top ten finishers in the men’s race were Americans. It was a result that not only attracted Letterman, but also those plotting a similar rebirth of British long-distance running. “You’re exactly where we were nine years ago,” Mary Wittenberg, New York’s race director, said. “That was the bottom of the bottom.”

Keflezighi described the change between then and now as “night and day”. The seeds of a revival were sown after the United States could take only one man and one woman marathon runner to the 2000 Olympics. Wittenberg said: “I wrote a note to USA Track & Field saying this was not acceptable. I said we had to start supporting the athletes. A country our size and we couldn’t even take a full team to the Olympics. Come on!”

In 1980, it took a sub-2hr 11min time to make the US Olympic team. In 2000, it took 2hr 15min. The pace of regress is mirrored in Britain. Steve Jones’s record of 2hr 7min 13sec is almost 25 years old and five minutes faster than the best this year, achieved by Dan Robinson last month.

After 2000, two brothers, Keith and Kevin Hanson, set up their own project in Detroit. They decided that a group ethic would work best and bought a house for their athletes, paid their medical insurance, provided coaching and equipment and got them jobs in their sports stores. This fledgeling idea became the Hansons-Brooks Distance Project for post-college runners. One of them, Nick Arciniaga, was eighth in New York.

Keflezighi trains with a high altitude group in Mammoth Lakes, California. He said: “The great thing about groups is you see someone you know doing well and think, ‘If he can do it then I can.’ You go through the same training programme so it’s a huge motivation.” It is an ethos that Ian Stewart, UK Athletics’ head of endurance, is trying to bring to Britain. A group of leading athletes, including Mo Farah, the European indoor 3,000 metres champion, and Lisa Dobriskey, the world 1,500 metres silver medal-winner, are at present at a high-altitude camp outside Eldoret in Kenya.

“We are all a really close group out here, eating and relaxing together,” Dobriskey said. “It’s good to listen to other people’s ideas and philosophies about running.”

This may not sound like rocket science, but the idea of training together has been lost. Wittenberg agrees. “People were training by themselves and we were falling back from the rest of the world,” she said. “It was awful in the late 1990s. I remember my first race with New York, standing on the finish line and thinking, ‘Where are the Americans?’”

Ditto the British men. Martin Yelling, husband of the Olympic marathon runner, Liz, and a coach, said that the problem is convincing people that marathon running is worthwhile. “Being a marathon runner, unless you are right at the top of the tree, simply isn’t a lucrative career choice,” he said. “You’d probably make more by going on the dole, but runners don’t do it for the money. They do it because the passion and the commitment courses through their blood.”

Wittenberg sees green shoots for Britain. There were plenty of experts in New York who believed that Farah should move up to the marathon. “If you could get a British man to even third in London, the impact would be huge,” Wittenberg said. “The pipeline is there.”