My heart went out to Laura Muir last weekend.
I haven’t met her yet but I’d noticed that her profile in athletics has been rising pretty quickly over the last couple of months.
I’m sure people in the sport could see the progress she was making, but it came as a bit of a surprise to me when she was mentioned as Britain’s best chance of a gold medal at the World Indoor Championships in Poland.
That’s a pretty big weight of expectation for a young runner who is new to that sort of attention.
Unfortunately she didn’t make it through her heat, and you could see how devastated she was afterwards.
She might not think it now, but the experience she’s just gone through could be the best thing to happen to her.
Let’s face it, as big a deal as a World Indoors is, it doesn’t come close to a home Commonwealth Games and all the other major events she’ll hopefully compete in down the years.
Poland might not be a bad to get an invaluable lesson.
I always feel that you have to learn how to lose before you can be a real winner.
Unfortunately there are more devastating defeats than glorious wins in a career. I can vouch for that.
The important thing is that you take things out of those bad days. That’s something I’ve come to realise more as I’ve matured.
My dad when he was our coach always stressed that, and so does Dave Hay now. What you do next is what matters most.
I’m sure Laura’s got good people around her, and she’s very lucky to have Eilidh Child there for advice. To have someone who went to the same school as you as a Team GB team-mate, who has been there and got the T-shirt, must be pretty rare.
The first World Ladies championship in 2007 was an eye-opener for me. It was my first big one as a skip and we didn’t contend at all that week. We weren’t a favourite going into it, like Laura was last weekend, but there was still a real disappointment when we didn’t perform to our best.
And, of course, the Vancouver Olympics four years ago was a real low.
But I now don’t think we would have won the medal in Sochi had it not been for Vancouver. That’s how important learning from a defeat can be.
Maybe we’ll all be cheering Laura at the top of the podium at Hampden Park in the summer.
* Talking of Hampden Park, it was great to see Jess Ennis-Hill make the effort to come to Glasgow to see the new running track.
She won’t be competing because she’s expecting her first baby but it says a lot about her as a person that she still wanted to do her bit to promote the Commonwealth Games. There are plenty who wouldn’t.
I must admit, of all the supportive messages I got before, during and after the Olympics, to get one from Jess was probably the most inspirational.
* We’re now well and truly back in training mode.
It hasn’t actually been that hard to pick up where we left off. Although it’s been the busiest couple of weeks I can remember, it isn’t actually that long since Sochi.
I still feel really motivated to finish the season on a high in our two last competitions in Canada.
There was a fun distraction from training on Wednesday when we gave the Glasgow Warriors rugby guys a curling lesson.
I’d like to stay that there was a future star among them…..but I’d be lying!
Usually when people try curling for the first time they struggle to get the stone half-way down, but that certainly wasn’t the case with these boys. They were chucking them right through!
They were all super competitive and a few of them were trying to break down the technical side of the game.
It’s always good when people from other sports see the level of difficulty in your own sport, and the level of fitness you need. I’m not naming names, but there were some of the lads who were puffing a bit with the sweeping!