New York Marathon: Paula exorcises demons

Sitting in the front row of the main stand watching Paula Radcliffe hobble across the finish line in the Bird's Nest in Beijing on the Sunday morning of 17 August, it was like intruding on private grief. The poor woman could hardly limp, let alone run or walk. She burst into tears as she embraced Liz Yelling, her fellow British Olympic marathoner and long-time Bedford and County club-mate. Her Olympic dream shattered once again, Radcliffe looked a brokenwoman, physically and mentally.

Eleven weeks on, all of the pieces have been put back in place. There are no scars in evidence as Radcliffe prepares to challenge for a third women's title in the ING New York City Marathon today. The body that gave up on her with a fractured femur three months out from Beijing – and with a calf cramp during the race – has fully repaired. Last Sunday in Portsmouth the 34-year-old clocked a British 10-mile record in the Great South Run. Happily, the mental wounds have healed too.

"You could let it destroy you, but I'm not going to do that," Radcliffe said, speaking to the travelling British media in a basement room at the Manhattan Hilton. She was reflecting not just on her latest brush with the fickle hand of Olympic-year fate but also on that which left her ill, injured and depleted of glycogen four miles from the finish of the 2004 marathon in Athens.

"I think if it happens twice you have to be more philosophical," she continued. "And I think having Isla [her 19-month-old daughter] there helps me to stay balanced, because she didn't care about what happened in Beijing. She was running up to me, shouting, 'Mama, Mama'. She didn't care whether I'd run well in the Olympics or not. I just look at her and... she's such a funny character. I wouldn't swap any bit of her for anything else. I think that does help to put things in perspective.

"I don't believe that an Olympic gold medal is vital to defining me as a person. There are things in my career that are as important. An Olympic gold would add to that, but you can't spend the whole time thinking 'What if? What if?' because millions of people don't get a chance to win an Olympic gold. There's just a select amount who do.

"If you talk to Kelly Holmes or Sally Gunnell [both Olympic champions], maybe there are things that they would have liked to add to their careers, and maybe to their lives as well. You can't have everything. Everybody can't have everything. You have to be realistic. While I do admit it's a big thing missing for me and something that really drives me on, there are things in my life I certainly wouldn't swap for it."

One of those, in Radcliffe's professional life, would be the world record she set in the Flora London Marathon in 2003: 2hr 15min 25sec. No other woman has got within three minutes of it; Catherine Ndereba, the Kenyan who took silver in the Beijing marathon and who will be one of the Briton's rivals here in the Big Apple today, is next fastest on the all-time list, with 2hr 18min 47sec. It is a truly stunning feat of speed endurance: 5min 9sec per mile for 26.2 miles.

It is worth 1,325 points on the Hungarian Scoring Tables, the definitive measure of the worth of athletics performances in different events. It equates to a 100m run by a woman in 10.30sec; Florence Griffith-Joyner's world record at that distance has stood at what is considered to be a freakish 10.49sec for two decades. It also equates to a 9.70sec 100m run by a man, a mere 0.01sec shy of the world record performance with which Usain Bolt had jaws dropping in Beijing in August.

The reassembled Radcliffe will not get close to matching it today on the undulating New York route, but she may eclipse Margaret Okayo's course record of 2hr 22min 31sec. That, and a third win in the Big Apple's big race, would be a satisfying start on the long road that leads to the next Olympic marathon, on home ground in 2012.