WITH Olympic selection on the line in today’s London Marathon, Susan Partridge needs no more motivation. However, if an extra nudge had been required, British Athletics provided her with it last month by omitting her from the World Half-Marathon Championships team. It is a decision that still rankles with the Scot.

“I was p****d off at being left out of the team because it was just inexplicable,” she says, having proved her credentials by running the Prague half-marathon faster than any of the British women had managed at the World Half-Marathon Championships a week earlier. “I’m cross with the governing body about the way they’ve handled it. I believe I should have been in there and I think I proved that.

“One of the main aims in the selection policy was to give marathon preparation opportunities. They did that with a couple of the other girls and then they came to me and totally disregarded that. It wasn’t because the girls they picked were so much faster because they weren’t, I’d beaten one of them in a half-marathon race a couple of weeks before the selection, so I couldn’t understand why they’d picked slower athletes who weren’t running the marathon.

“In my view, the selectors are getting it wrong too often and it needs to be looked at.”

Partridge was so annoyed she wrote an email to British Athletics asking to know why she didn’t fit the criteria for selection, but had no response.

“The very least I’m owed is an explanation,” she says. “There should be an appeals process. They’re making mistakes, and maybe that’s always going to happen, but it seems to me that they’re completely unaccountable.”

The Scot, however, has harnessed her disappointment to use it in a positive way.

“It has motivated me,” she says. “I think I respond well to pressure and when it matters, that’s when I perform. That’s the good thing about London, it’s black and white for Olympic selection.”

At the age of 36, this may be Partridge’s last chance to make an Olympic team and she knows she needs the run of her life today. Competition is fierce and selection will only be guaranteed by being one of the first two Britons to cross the finish line, as well as having dipped below the qualifying mark of 2 hours 31 minutes. She was agonisingly close to achieving the time at last October’s Chicago Marathon but missed out by just 31 seconds.

Partridge’s fastest marathon is 2:30:46, which she ran at the 2013 London Marathon, a performance she needs to repeat today.

“I always get a bit nervous as well as excited in the lead-up but my build-up for this race has gone well,” says the Scot, who needs an Olympic Games on her CV to complete the quartet of major sporting events having competed in the World and European Championships, as well as the Commonwealth Games. “When I start tapering, I start to wonder: have I done enough? Am I getting too old? But I’m excited and I believe I’ll be in good form at the start line.”

This year’s London Marathon field is strong and includes five women who have run sub-2:20. But with half a dozen Britons, including Partridge’s compatriot, Freya Ross, in with a shout of Olympic selection, much of the focus will be on the home athletes and the Oban-born runner knows she must be mindful of what her competitors are doing.

“It should be a good race and it won’t be a time-trial, it’s going to be about beating the other athletes in the field for qualification,” she says. “It’s two-and-a-half hours of pain compared to however many weeks of disappointment if you miss out. I imagine there’ll be a group running together until about half way and then things will begin to happen.”

As with most sports, elite marathon running is a mind game and Partridge is not unique in using visualisation as a tool to improve her performance. What is more unusual though, are the scenarios she imagines while racing.

“I’ll be picturing myself finishing strongly down the Mall and winning,” she says. “But I also think about bizarre things happening; I’ll picture myself falling and then getting up and catching up with the field. Or I’ll be in a scene in a Hollywood action movie, with a cheesy theme tune playing, and crossing the finishing line. It doesn’t have to be remotely realistic, it’s just anything that feeds the adrenaline.”

Hopefully, adrenaline won’t be in short supply today.