Radcliffe says "strong" for marathon

15/08/2008 23:00

By John Chalmers

BEIJING (Reuters) - Paula Radcliffe would have liked more time to prepare for Sunday’s Beijing marathon after fracturing her leg and being bitten by a spider, but she is feeling strong and hungry for her first Olympic medal.

"Obviously I could do with a few more weeks’ training," she said on Friday in an interview granted by Nike, her sponsor.

"But I am here and I think the fact that I’m here, and I’m strong -- very strong actually -- will be an advantage for me in the race too."

Radcliffe, who holds the world record for women’s marathon, said she was in better shape than she was for the 2004 Games in Athens, when she pulled out suffering pain and heat exhaustion.

This time she has prepared for the heat of Beijing, using an ice-filled PreCool vest in training and just ahead of the race to lower her core body temperature and save energy.

"It’s just about going in and running the best race I can do ... control yourself and hopefully cope well with the conditions which are going to make it a very tough race," she said.

Radcliffe, 34, shrugged off concerns about the air quality Beijing and its impact on endurance sport athletes.

"Afterwards we may feel the effects. Really sore throats, blocked noses the day after," she said. "If .....continued below

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things go according to plan in the race, I’ll take the suffering afterwards."

However, doubts about her form have made Kenya’s Catherine Ndereba the favourite to cross the line first in Beijing.

"THE HARDEST THING"

In May, Radcliffe announced she had a stress fracture of her left femur, and that some specialists had told her it would be impossible for her to compete in Beijing.

One of Britain’s few hopes for athletics gold, she launched herself into a regime of cross-training instead of clocking up miles on the road, including water sessions and Nordic skiing.

"The whole thing has just been the hardest thing that I’ve ever done, coming through this," she said.

"Running outside is what I love doing. It’s much easier to do that than it is to do the huge amounts of cross-training, looking at walls and not even being outside. So certainly when it gets really tough in that race I’m going to be thinking about walls stuck in front of my face, and that’s going to be pushing me on."

Adding to her pre-Olympics nightmare, Radcliffe was bitten by a poisonous spider during rehabilitation in France.

"There were a lot of things going wrong and I almost felt like I was being tested to see if I wanted to be here strongly enough," she said.

Radcliffe has a host of big-city titles and owns the three fastest times run, including her world record of 2 hours, 15.25 minutes, more than 3 minutes faster than any other woman. Yet her return from three visits to the Olympics has been disappointing.

When she withdrew from the Athens marathon she sat on the kerb and wept, creating a backlash against an athlete who two years earlier was voted Britain’s sports personality of the year.

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