So significant have the injury challenges Zoey Clark has faced over the past two years, she admits she still has to fend off the nagging doubts that she’ll ever return to anything close to her previous best.
But having endured two years of rehab and recovery, Clark is, finally, in as good a position, both physically and mentally.
Pre-injury, Clark had established herself as one of Scotland’s best-ever 400m runners.
Relay silver at the 2017 World Championships was quickly followed by European indoor and outdoor, World indoor and Commonwealth Games medals, while she also fulfilled a life-long goal of becoming an Olympian having made it into Team GB for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
However, despite everything going seemingly smoothly, Clark was struck down in the first week of 2023 with a disk problem in her back which left her, at times, unable to even stand never mind run.
And so followed an interminably long recovery process, from which Clark is only now beginning to truly emerge.
But emerge, she really has.
Today, Clark will run her first indoor 400m for four years when she lines up at the Glasgow EAP Indoor International at the Emirates Arena and she admits it’s been a long road back to this point.
“The past couple of years have been very, very up and down. There were definitely times I wondered if I’d ever get back to running well and to be honest, I still have those moments,” the 30-year-old Aberdonian says.
“I have sessions where I feel great but then I have sessions where I’m really far off my previous best and that’s when it enters my head that maybe I'll never get my old form back. I know it’s normal to go through these highs and lows but it’s definitely tough.
“It’s been a slow recovery process and I’m still not quite where I was pre-injury, but things are definitely starting to feel a lot more normal.”
Clark’s disk issue caused nerve damage in her leg, which prolonged her recovery further and she admits having become an Olympian in 2021, sitting at home while her former teammates battled it out for places in the British team for Paris 2024 wasn’t easy.
“I did manage to get back competing last year, which was great but it was difficult because I was really far off where I had been previously when I made it to Tokyo,” she says.
“As an athlete, you sometimes have this distorted sense of what might be possible. You probably need that belief about what you can potentially manage but I think it caused me to put too much pressure on myself ahead of last year’s Olympics. So then when I started to race and I saw my times were well off where they’d need to be to make the Olympics, it hit me harder than it might otherwise have done because that’s when I started to realise the season might not go how I wanted.
“But when I took a step back and accepted the Olympics wasn’t going to happen, it was a really positive turn for me and I started to run better because I wasn’t putting any pressure on myself.”
The major event in the schedule this year is the World Championships, which will take place in Tokyo in September, and Clark has allowed herself, momentarily at least, to ponder the prospect of returning to contention for the GB team in which she was once a regular fixture.
However, she’s never been one to shout about her ambitions, instead preferring her talking to be done on the track and she approaches 2025 with exactly the same attitude.
In Glasgow today she will be severely tested, with Olympians Lina Nielsen from GB and Sharlene Mawdsley from Ireland also racing the 400m but with Clark’s major focus on the outdoor season, she’s furiously trying to keep her expectations at bay, for now anyway.
“I'm really excited about racing in Glasgow - I’ve got no pressure on me so I’m just going to try and soak it all up,,” she says.
“It’ll be a good quality race and I’d like to run quick, but that's not the main goal - it’s about building up to the summer.
“Obviously, there's major competitions later in the year that I’d love to be at, but I don’t like to shout about what I might do - I’d rather let my results speak for themselves.”
There’s a sizeable Scottish contingent in action in Glasgow today alongside Clark, with notable appearances from Sarah Calvert in the 800m, Kane Elliot in the 1500m and Alyson Bell in the 60m.
GB Olympian Emily Borthwick will be competing in the high jump, as will Dutch relay Olympic champions, Eugene Omalla and Isaya Klein Ikkink, who will be running the men’s 400m.
