IT wasn't so long ago that the winner of one of the PFA Scotland player of the year awards chose to mark the feat by spending the next few hours in police custody. Suffice to say that Laura Muir marked her Scottish athlete of the year gong in a rather more productive manner. Some 12 hours after she clocked off and returned home from the glitzy award ceremony at around midnight on Saturday night, her coach Andy Young's Garmin dutifully pinged at around mid-day on Sunday with confirmation that his star pupil had completed her latest gruelling 20k training run, taking around 75 minutes. There was more of the same yesterday, plus the small matter of squeezing in a couple of cardiology lectures as she works towards the fourth year of her degree in veterinary medicine at the Glasgow vets' school.
"I checked in on her Garmin and, sure enough, she’d done it all at six-minute miles or something like that," said Young, who completed a memorable double on the night by claiming the coach of the year prize. "I wouldn’t say it’s how I check up on her, that’s not the words I’d use, but I can keep an eye on training. It now syncs straight with her phone, so she comes back in from training and contacts with the phone, that uploads to her Garmin site – which I can check from my phone. I can see what pace she went at, where she ran, everything."
They say you should never meet your heroes. Muir is convinced that she can beat hers. The 22-year-old from Milnathort grew up idolising Dame Kelly Holmes but after a storming 2015 she now stands just second behind the double Olympic champion on the all-time British 1,500m list, the 3:58:66secs which she ran on Diamond League business in Monaco earlier in the season tantalisingly close to Holmes' all-time mark of 3:57:90. While she won't care a jot what time she runs if she can build on her fifth place finish at this year's World Championships in Beijing to claim an Olympic medal in Rio, don't tell Muir that Holmes' time is out of reach. For starters, as she correctly calculates, in all likelihood she has more than a decade to do it.
"I don't see why not!" said Muir. "I have got another ten years hopefully in the bag or so. I think I have got a good chance of going faster because that was a really mixed pace race. It went off very fast, but given an even-paced race I think I could go even faster. I have never met her but I definitely idolised her [Holmes]. She was probably my earliest memory at an Olympics, I remember seeing her win her double gold and thinking 'wow, that is pretty impressive'. To be following in her footsteps is great and hopefully I can try to get one of her achievements one day."
This balancing act between academia and athletics is becoming even more acute as Muir enters Olympic year. With exams in March and April, she has no plans to participate in the World Indoor Championships, but she will make room in her schedule for cross country, including this weekend in the mist of Bellahouston, regardless of the increased risk of tweaking a muscle or overextending a joint on a slippy or uneven piece of ground. "You do think about that but when you are doing grass sessions the risk is just as much," said Muir. "I am fortunate I have raced quite a lot over these courses over the years and I am pretty good at looking our for things!"
If the gloom and cold of Glasgow in mid-November seems strange preparation for the sweltering heat of Rio next August at least Muir has some warm-weather training pencilled in as she gears up for Olympic glory. She hopes to spend a South African safari with her family over Christmas and New Year. "That is the best place for training at that time of year really," said Muir. "With my course I can't go on the November/January camp with British Athletics so Christmas is the only time I will have off, but hopefully my family can come out as well and we can have a different Christmas."
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