I’ll never play it safe and settle for bronze... I’m here to win gold
LAURA MUIR as you’ve never seen her before...
LAURA MUIR is not scared of spiders, heights or water. As a veterinary student she has helped to deliver puppies and lambs and perform caesarean sections and post-mortems on small animals. She kept rats as a kid. So Muir’s response when asked about her greatest fear is revealing.
‘I think it’s maybe not fulfilling your potential,’ she says. ‘You want to make the most of what you’ve got, don’t you?’
The Scot has enjoyed a swift rise to the top of middle-distance running. She set five British records in six months and then scooped two gold medals in the 1500m and 3,000m at the European indoor championships in Belgrade in March.
Muir was ranked No 1 in the world over 1500m last season, becoming only the third British woman to win a prestigious Diamond League title — together with a £30,000 cheque and ‘a big trophy with a diamond on top’.
Yet only five years ago trips to Menorca and Dublin were the extent of her forays abroad. She has taken a break from her studies at Glasgow University this year but will allow herself only one week’s holiday after this summer’s world championships in London before starting another placement.
The 24-year-old still lives in student digs with housemates who have to be warned why the doorbell might ring in the small hours.
‘I had to tell them about drug testers,’ says Muir, laughing. ‘If the doorbell goes at 7am, someone is going to ask me to pee in front of them and they shouldn’t panic!’
Yet it is not only Muir’s achievements that have made her a genuine contender in the 1500m and 5,000m at the world championships.
It is also the way she has gone about her races — attacking them, elbows out, with a bravery and commitment that has caught the eye.
‘I used to find the pressure quite hard to deal with and I got really, really nervous,’ she says. ‘I think that kind of took away from my performances because I was wasting so much energy.
‘In 2015 I decided, “Right, you train really hard to go and race and you’re not enjoying the racing. So, you know what, just start enjoying the racing and be relaxed and perform better”.
‘Now I see that pressure as support. People recognise you’re doing well and they expect you to run well. I know what I want from a race. I spoke to a psychologist when I was really nervous to see if that would help but it just wasn’t for me.
‘I recognise it’s really important for some people but I’m pretty clear cut about stuff. I have the attitude of, “Just get on with it”.’
The steeliness which has come to typify Muir’s charges around the track feels completely at odds with the engaging, inquisitive, feather-light woman who chats easily and giggles freely in a Glasgow hotel.
She skips into the room in a series of outfits and proudly shows off the silver Olympic rings necklace her parents commissioned from the Glasgow School of Art. But the feistiness returns when Muir is asked about Genzebe Dibaba, the 1500m world champion and world recordholder from Ethiopia.
‘I’ve not spoken to her before,’ says Muir. ‘I’ve not raced against her that much.’
Is she doubling up in London, too? ‘I don’t know what she’s doing.’ Do you care? ‘Basically, I’m doing my two events and I’ll race whoever’s there.’ Muir, you feel, will do things her way. After winning the first of her two gold medals in Belgrade, an unfortunate woman had the temerity to tell Muir she could not go on a lap of honour. ‘I just said I was going on one,’ says Muir, who then darted past the official and grabbed a Union flag. ‘It was my first title! I felt I needed to put out a bit of a statement in the indoor season. I was finding I was lining up for races and pretty much everybody had won a medal. I wanted my name to be like that. “She came fifth at the world championships?” No!’ It was the same approach Muir adopted in the 1500m final at last summer’s Olympic Games in Rio. The Scot pushed the pace with two laps to go but then faded to seventh. By contrast, the USA’s Jenny Simpson stuck with the pack and coasted down the home straight to take bronze. But Muir has no regrets. She says: ‘I would approach it the same way, definitely, because I would rather lose a medal than come third and think, “I could have won that race”. ‘I could have held back and gone for
bronze but, if I did, gold would definitely have gone. So, yes, I did everything I could to win the race. That’s what I do.’
Accordingly, Muir has adopted an almost Spartan approach to what she puts into her tiny frame. She cooks most of her own food — ‘so I know what’s going into things’ — and largely avoids supplements and medication.
‘I hardly take anything at all,’ says Muir. ‘I don’t even use recovery shakes. I’ll just have water and then a banana after training.
‘I like to know that what I put on the track is 100 per cent me and nothing else — even when things are perfectly legal to take.
‘You could probably count on two hands the amount of painkillers I’ve taken in my life. I’d rather feel the pain. I’ll just go through it. I do have quite a high pain threshold. Pretty much what you see is what you get.’
Muir realises, though, that this is not necessarily the case for all athletes. She knows she may well be competing against cheats but thinks European Athletics’ recent proposal to scrap all world records set before 2005, when blood and urine samples were first stored by the sport’s world governing body, masks the root of the problem.
‘They need to catch the cheats first,’ she says. ‘People are still running who are probably not clean athletes and will set records and they’re not going to be scrapped (under the proposals) because they’ve put a date on it. It needs a bit of fine-tuning.’
How frustrating is that? Muir shrugs. ‘You can’t control what other people do.
‘The best I can do is be the best athlete I can be. Hopefully I’ll get the performances that I’m capable of.’