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Paula Radcliffe after her "training run" when finishing ninth in the World 10000 metres final is adamant she is ready to win next Sunday's Championships marathon title. The world record-holder looking fresh and relaxed on Sunday morning, said: "I got a hard run-out which was the aim of last night. I didn't run as fast as I was hoping to but the conditions had a lot to do with that. I didn't have the pace to go with the race in the end, probably because I still had so much training in my legs. I ran 30 minutes 42 seconds which is similar to what I ran in New Orleans, but it was a lot windier last night and up and down in the second part of the race," she said when comparing the race to her pre-London Marathon tester in March.
Radcliffe added: "If I'd run faster I'd have been even more confident but I don't come away thinking something is wrong. I had a good run out, a shorter run than normal because I would normally have done my last 90-minute run, but yeah, mission accomplished."
Radcliffe, insisting her ambition of winning a 10000m global title isn't over, added: "I wouldn't say they are totally behind me until I hang up my spikes because you never know. I'm probably moving on, the marathon is more likely but I'm not saying I'll never run another global 10k. At my best I would be sharper but a 58-second last lap is frightening," Radcliffe admitted after Tirunesh Dibaba of
<country-region w:st="on" />
<place w:st="on" />Ethiopia
</place />
</country-region />produced her last astonishing final circuit to lead an Ethiopian clean sweep of the medals.
Radcliffe insisted: "You'd have to go away and work towards trying to combat that. Some of the 800m runners can't finish in 58 seconds even when they go through slow at the beginning. I only had the one option, I had to make it hard. No-one else was going to be prepared to do that, especially when it was windy. I was surprised there were so many people still in the pack. I'd be lying if I said at any point in that race I thought 'I'm going to back off and save something for the marathon' because I didn't."
Then Radcliffe looking forward to next weekend, said: "The marathon is about going in and knowing you're strong and have done the training. It's more about what's physically in the bank and mentally knowing what you've done, than what anybody else does or doesn't do in the build-up to it. I don't think there are many girls in the marathon that could have gone out there and run faster than me last night."