Kinghorn is raring to go after enjoying mini-gap year

Refreshed and refocused, Sammi Kinghorn returns to the roads tomorrow for the first time since April’s Commonwealth Games with a foray on to the streets of Glasgow for the Great Scottish Run. The double para athletics world champion skipped the summer season to go wild Down Under and roam free.

“I felt like I needed that because the next few years up to Tokyo is going to be pretty serious and I’ll need to be very committed,” the 22-year-old said. Seizing the opportunity for a splash of self-discovery, a rite of passage enjoyed by her peers, meant missing the European Championships but if it was now or never, then it was an easy decision to make.

“I left school, started to do athletics fulltime and that was it,” Kinghorn, pictured, added. “It was just about ticking more boxes leading up to winning world titles in London. Now there is a pressure on me every single day so I just needed that time to enjoy some things I’d missed out on.

“It was so weird not to have the commitments. I could go ‘I will have a glass of wine’ or ‘I will do a bungee jump’ without thinking about training every ten seconds. After the Gold Coast, I went to New Zealand and slept in a car and stayed in hostels and it felt like a mini-gap year.”

While defending men’s champion Chris Thompson will utilise his halfmarathon outing in Glasgow to prep for next month’s New York Marathon, Kinghorn’s pursuit of a repeat wheelchair 10k win is merely an exercise in reacquainting herself with the hubris.

“The hills are pretty horrible,” the Borderer acknowledged. “The wrists are aching and then on the downhills, you can get up to 30 miles an hour. My personal best is 22 minutes but anything under 30 will do.”