When winter training begins for most athletes around October, the goal is modest and straightforward: put together as many weeks of solid, uninterrupted training as possible.
Stay injury-free, stay healthy, and tick off the sessions one by one. By January of this year, Zoey Clark was doing just that – doing everything she needed to do without breaking the bank. The niggles were manageable, and the fatigue had been kept at bay.
It was after a relatively routine set of 60m races at Aberdeen Sports Village in January that, suddenly, Clark’s uninterrupted progress ground to a juddering halt.
Having clocked a time of 7.44sec, Clark had just run the second fastest 60m of her career – all the more impressive given that Aberdeen Sports Village’s indoor track is not necessarily known to be lightning quick in mid-winter.
But only a few hours after such an encouraging performance, Clark found she could hardly stand up.
She didn’t know it then, but she had slipped a disc in her spine and, it seemed that in an instant, all the potential which the 2023 season had to offer vanished into thin air.
She said: “I was ready to springboard into 2023 and make my mark.
“All the signs were there in training. I was running quicker times than I had before. I was lifting weights in the gym heavier than I had before. I know I was in great shape, so it made this injury hit harder I think.
“It was when I wasn’t able to stand anymore that we knew something was really wrong.
“We got sent for an MRI to get a proper diagnosis which was a large prolapsed disk in my spine.”
Zoey Clark: ‘I couldn’t move at all’
There are few worse injuries athletes can suffer, not least because the effects border on debilitating. Even Clark’s day job as a process engineer suffered.
She said: “The first two weeks were pretty grim to be honest.
“For the first few days I just really couldn’t move at all – I was stuck in my bed.
“The pain was manageable if I was lying down, but as soon as I stood, because there was so much inflammation in my lower spine, it just compressed my nerve so much.
“I did have to take a few days off work initially because although standing was a problem, sitting was also a problem.
“But things are much more flexible now since Covid, so I managed to get back to work pretty quickly working from home with a modified desk set-up.
“I think that was really good for me mentally just having something to distract me from the injury.”
Healing quicker than expected
It’s not the first time that, perhaps counterintuitively, work has come to the rescue for Clark. Having an alternative focus has, as Clark has always made clear, been hugely beneficial since she started working for Wood Group in 2020.
But with a competitive season firmly out of the picture this summer, the forthcoming Worlds in Hungary will be the first major outdoor championships Clark has missed since 2017, when she made her international breakthrough in London.
Since then, the 28-year-old has represented Great Britain at two European Championships, two Commonwealth Games, two further World Championships, and an Olympics.
It is an astonishing statistic which few other athletes can match, but having looked at the situation with a heavy dose of realism, Clark knows that sitting this season out is the best option in the long term, with the Olympics just over a year away.
“It’s up to my body,” she said.
“I’m healing quicker than what was expected which was really positive and in a way I’m quite lucky because we had three major champs last year.
“Next year is the Olympics, so if you’re going to get injured, maybe this is not the worst year to do it in.
“I’m trying to do all the right things, trying to not go crazy to put myself backwards. I’m just trying to make positive steps in the right direction to get back to running quickly.”
It’s a sense of caution shared by her coach, Ryan Oswald.
“There is a plan in place for Zoey to come back to the sport, but it’s largely down to Zoey’s body and how she recovers,” he said.
“It’s a slow process. The key thing is to not take steps backwards. It’s just when she’s ready.
“We’re not going to cobble together a season just on the off chance that she could potentially qualify for the World Championships. That’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to be sensible about it.”
Conversation