LAURA MUIR might face a race against time to be on the start line for next month’s IAAF World Championships in Doha but at least her training partner and Great Britain team-mate Jemma Reekie hopes she is timing her run perfectly.

Fresh from an altitude camp in St Moritz, today sees the 21-year-old Kilbarchan athlete – who trains alongside Muir under the watchful eye of Andy Young at the Emirates Arena – tackle the Emslie Carr mile at the Muller Grand Prix in Birmingham, with another visit to the Alexander Stadium in the UK’s second city scheduled in seven days’ time for the British Championships.

While Muir is back running in practice, an untimely calf injury picked up at the London Anniversary Games means the European outdoor and indoor 1500m champion – some five seconds quicker than everyone else in the UK - will require one of the discretionary spots from the selectors.

That leaves two places up for grabs, with British indoor champion Reekie required in seven days’ time to go one better or equal last year’s result, where she finished second behind Laura Weightman. The field vying for a Doha spot in the women’s 1500m is almost as stacked as it is in the men, with Melissa Courtney, Eilish McColgan and Sarah McDonald all in the mix too.

Reekie knows all about last minute dramas before these events – she succumbed to a cold two weeks out from the European Indoors in Glasgow in March, fighting it off to compete, even if she wasn’t 100 per cent - but she has reason to hope that both she and her more illustrious team-mate will be out there battling it out in Doha. Only last month, after all, she was taking a page out of Muir’s book by becoming the first athlete from these islands to win double gold at the European Under-23 championships in Gavle, Sweden, meaning that for a short while at least Scots from Young’s little training group held all of the continent’s 1500m honours.

Like the single-minded Muir, Reekie has sacrificed a lot to get this far. She marked the moment with nothing more hedonistic than a trip to McDonald’s and a McFlurry.

“I guess I’ve been living my life like a professional athlete since I was 17,” said Reekie, who benefited from sponsorship from a local firm CK contracts to take her to altitude camps from a young age. “Now I do things and I don’t even notice. My parents were so frustrated with me when I started athletics, because I switched off from everything else. All I wanted to do was athletics but they were like ‘school comes first, and you’ve got all these other hobbies’.

“From then on I didn’t really care about what other people my age were doing. I used to do a bit of field hockey, swim, go horse riding a lot, I only stopped when I got to 16,17 and I realised I couldn’t do everything.

“Athletics just became a real priority for me. Since then I’ve been very obsessed with this sport. My friends were going out partying quite young, going out drinking, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care if people thought I was weird. At school I would be going for a run at lunchtime, people were saying ‘oh my God you are so weird’. But I just didn’t care. Now when I see them they say ‘oh you have done so well’. I’ve seen loads of young athletes get side-tracked with stuff like that, and it is so frustrating to watch.”

Fully funded now, Reekie has managed to pack plenty of championships experience in for someone so young.

“The mile at the Birmingham Grand Prix is going to be really tough,” she said. “And I’m only about fifth or sixth in Britain in terms of my times, but when it comes to championships I am pretty confident. I feel like I am a pretty good championship racer. Hopefully that gets me on the plane to Doha.

“It would be a great experience to go out to a World Championships ahead of next year and the Olympics. Up to now I have done European things, but to go a bit further afield to Doha I think would set me up very well. I have just been taking it bit by bit.”