It has been a long time coming but Paula Radcliffe yesterday confirmed that she is ready to end her 21-month sabbatical and provide a post-Osaka boost to British athletics. The marathon mother said she would make her much-anticipated return in the BUPA Great North Run on Tyneside two weeks on Sunday. “I now feel that I am ready to come out and race well,” she said.
Radcliffe’s last race was on New Year’s Eve, 2005, when she won a 10km event in Madrid, since when she has been sidelined by a foot injury, pregnancy and two stress fractures at the base of her spine. She gave birth to Isla in January, started jogging 12 days later and was targeting the 10,000 metres at the World Championships in Japan only for a sacral injury, suffered during a fittingly marathon 27-hour labour, to delay her comeback.
“I really missed racing through the pregnancy and the setbacks have emphasised this even more,” she said. “I chose a half [marathon] because I wanted a good-quality fast race to blow away the cobwebs.”
Radcliffe and her husband-cum-manager, Gary Lough, made the decision last week and will be keen to see just how much her time off, coupled with the injuries, have affected her. Intriguingly, the Berlin Marathon takes place on the same day, but that would have been too daunting a task for even an athlete of Radcliffe’s calibre to consider. She will probably be tempted by the New York Marathon on November 4, and the organisers will move heaven and earth to accommodate her, but that too would be a huge test after almost two years out. Other events on the horizon include the BUPA Great South Run in Portsmouth in October and the European Cross-Country Championships in Spain in December.
The fact that Radcliffe is returning at half-marathon distance, rather than in a shorter race, suggests she feels confident enough in her body to forgo a softly-softly approach. The festering wounds of Athens, when anti-inflammatory drugs hindered her performance in the marathon and 10,000 metres, mean Newcastle is where she sets off on the road to Beijing. “I wasn’t sleeping before, during or after the \ Olympics,” she said in May. “Gary asked me to consider sleeping pills. We couldn’t go home initially because the media were camped outside our door.” Now she believes she can still be an Olympic contender, not only in China next year, but in London in 2012, when she will be 38.
The staccato nature of her return has clearly been a source of irritation. She was told to take six weeks off in May, after her stress fracture came to light, but was still intending to compete in Osaka at the time. Having been forced to pull out of two World Championships, a London Marathon and a Commonwealth Games through injury since breaking the marathon record in a glittering 2002, Radcliffe does not know whether she can recover her best form. “It has been a really frustrating time recently, especially missing out on Osaka and watching the 10,000 metres, which seemed more open than it has been for years,” she said. In that race Jo Pavey, of Britain, was a gritty fourth and she will also be in the field for the 21km run from Newcastle to South Shields.
Radcliffe, who has twice won the Great North Run, sounded a confident note. “I had to be patient until my body recovered and I have been able to get a good base of decent training in,” she said. “It has underlined to me how much I want to carry on competing for a while yet. I stayed positive and did huge amounts of cross-training while I was injured, but it was still hard. Now that I have no injury, at least the cross-training is paying off in that I can get back racing faster.”
How fast, only time will tell. In Radcliffe’s absence, the Japan-based Briton, Mara Yamauchi, briefly led the marathon at the World Championships before dropping back to ninth. The humidity of Beijing will hold few fears for her, but Radcliffe faces another Herculean labour as she begins what promises to be her most challenging year to date.
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