It is the prospect of the elite women that is setting pulses racing ahead of the New York City Marathon a fortnight today. It promises to be the mother of all battles.

At 33, Britain's Paula Radcliffe will be contesting her first marathon, and only her second race, since giving birth to her first child, her daughter Isla, in January this year. As the holder of the world marathon record, there will be considerable interest in how she will fare at her specialist distance on the comeback trail from childbirth and with the Beijing Olympics just nine months' distant on the horizon.

Like Radcliffe, world champion Catherine Ndereba also happens to be a mother, though a rather more experienced one. Her daughter, Jane, was born in 1997. For 10 years now, the 35-year-old Kenyan woman has been a significant trailblazer for the sporting motherhood.

With her drive, her talent, and her ambition, though, she succeeded both in breaking through the social barriers and in becoming a world-beating professional runner.

Ndereba's winning time in Chicago in 2001 was a world record. It came seven days after Naoko Takahashi of Japan had become the first woman to break two hours 20 minutes.

While Radcliffe has since taken women's marathon running to a whole new dimension . . . to the brink of sub-2:15 territory . . . Ndereba has established herself as the most accomplished female marathon runner in the field of championship competition.

She has finished in the top two in the past four global championships: winning the World Championship in Paris in 2003, taking an Olympic silver behind Mizuki Noguchi of Japan in 2005, finishing runner-up to Radcliffe in the 2005 World Championships and emerging victorious from a thriller of a World Championship race in the stifling heat and humidity of Osaka in August this year.

It was all very different, of course, in the days of Francina Blankers-Koen. The world frowned when "Fanny" Blankers-Koen left her two children at home in Amsterdam to compete in the London Olympics in 1948.

Blankers-Koen became the star of those post-war London Olympics, winning gold medals in the 100m, 200m, 80m hurdles and 4 x 100m relay. Her quadruple success remains a feat unmatched by any other female in Olympic track-and-field history.

Unknown to herself and the world at the 1948 Games, Blankers-Koen was actually three months pregnant at the time. It was she who conceived the concept of the successful sporting mother that has become so commonplace that it is barely remarked upon these days.

Indeed, outside Jana Rawlinson's native Australia there was barely a passing note of recognition when she won the 400m hurdles title in August, making it from the maternity ward to the top of the World Championship podium in record time.

Only eight months before, the wife of the former British hurdler Chris Rawlinson had given birth to a son, Cornelis.

She had also spent two and a half of those months incapacitated by injury.

"There is some truth to the saying that mummies come back strong, " says Rawlinson. "I've spoken to Paula Radcliffe about this. As a mummy, you can do anything.

There were three of us in the final in Osaka."

Radcliffe spent a gruelling 27 hours in labour at the Princess Grace Hospital in Monaco, enduring the pain of her baby's head being stuck at her coccyx for half an hour.

She left hospital on crutches, and when she started running again she developed a stress fracture at the base of her spine.

Still, Radcliffe has returned to competitive action with a renewed zeal, and no doubt with a raised pain threshold.

It has long been established that childbirth can boost aerobic capac ity and red blood cell count, proving of particular benefit to distance-running mothers. Ingrid Kristiansen broke world records at 5,000m, 10,000m and the marathon in the three years following the birth of her son, Gaute. Others have prospered too: Liz McColgan, Sonia O'Sullivan, Lisa Ondieki.

In New York, though, especially with Ndereba in the field, Radcliffe knows she will have to rid herself of any residual rust.