There can be few athletes in the UK this year who have experienced as meteoric a rise as Megan Keith, and, for that matter, few athletes on the globe who have managed to qualify for their debut World Athletics Championships by accident.
The Invernesian produced the 5,000m run of her career at the London Diamond League last month to secure a shock qualification for this year’s championships, which are being staged in Hungary for the first time.
To put Keith’s Diamond League performance into context, her time of 14:56.98sec was more than half a minute quicker than the time she ran to win the European Under-23 Championships in Finland earlier this summer.
The track at the London Stadium is notoriously quick, and with a crowd of more than 50,000 inside, the venue was certainly atmospheric, but much of Keith’s performance last month was of her own making. She has shown she is an athlete who shows up when it matters.
Only, this race was not meant to matter. Qualifying for the World Athletics Championships was never even close to featuring on Keith’s radar. She didn’t even compete at the UK Championships, the competition which acted as the trials for Budapest, when they were staged in Manchester last month.
It was only in the London Stadium mixed zone, when Keith was fielding questions from the press about the potential of representing Great Britain at the worlds, that it started to dawn on her that her 5,000m performance was under UKA’s notoriously steep qualification mark.
“I didn’t even know when the worlds were,” she said. “I had four or five interviews in the mixed zone, and everyone was asking me about Budapest.
“I was thinking ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about, I didn’t run the trials’.”
It took a question from a member of UK Athletics’ media team for Keith to catch on.
She added: “Then it came to the last person for me to speak to – it was a lady from British Athletics, and she was asking me various questions about Budapest.
“I was answering negatively, before she stopped me and said: ‘You do know you ran the qualifying mark?’
“She explained to me I’d gone under it by 0.02sec, and things made more sense after that. But I was in my own bubble, not really knowing what had happened.”
Hard work is paying off
Those around her, however, knew.
Her coach, Ross Cairns, and UKA’s head of endurance, Steve Vernon, told her things were looking positive – and so it proved.
Although Keith’s new personal best may have been a shock to onlookers, recent performances in training suggested she had that time in her.
When looking at her improvements from a macro perspective, however, even Keith has to blink a couple of times.
“Up until the London Diamond League, everything was in line with what training was indicating,” she explained. “I’ve been running quicker in training this year, and the pace has been feeling more comfortable, so in that respect, what I’ve been doing in competition has lined up with that.
“But then I stop and think about how things have come on in the last two or three years – I couldn’t even have dreamt of breaking nine minutes for 3,000m two years ago.
“I went from not only breaking it for 3,000m, but to then running sub-nine for 3,000m over 5,000m.
“It’s just when you stop and think about it like that – then it feels crazy. To me, it’s not felt like it’s been an overnight breakthrough, but on paper, results can look far more stark than they actually seem.
“When you stop and think about how far things have come, it’s amazing.”
Though Budapest is her first major international championship as a senior, it seems unlikely that Keith will be overwhelmed by the experience – not least because her Edinburgh housemate, Alyson Bell, is on the team, too.
The two roomed together at the European Under-23 championships in Finland, and given they each brought home a gold medal, it’s clearly a propitious pairing.
“I’ll find plenty of stuff to do when I’m out there,” Keith said. “Alyson and I roomed together in Finland, and there was a lot of nothing time out there because we were there for seven to eight days, but we managed to fill time. If we’re allowed, it’s fun to go exploring as well.”
When she lines up on the 5,000m start line on Wednesday, Keith will have another chance to venture into uncharted territory.
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