Athletics: McIlroy sticks with the steeples

Kate Mcilroy leaves next week for a European track campaign she hopes will launch her bid for next year's world championships and the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Based in Belgium for the European summer, McIlroy will make her IAAF season debut at the Crystal Palace Super Grand Prix meeting at the end of the month. She will run the 5000m but it is not, she says, an indication she will turn her attention primarily to the flat race.

Initially, McIlroy thought the 3000m steeplechase, in which she placed fifth at the recent Commonwealth Games, would be a convenient stepping stone to the 5000m but her thinking has changed slightly.

"Primarily, I'm going over for race experience and to get my times down but I've qualified for the world champs next year in the 3000m steeple and the qualifying standards for 5000m are pretty tough.

"Even if I did do it and qualified for both, I'd still concentrate on the steeples, just because I've got a better chance in it on a world scale."

The women's 3000m steeplechase is a relatively new event, still developing in terms of the times athletes might be able to reach.

"It's just trying to be competitive. I might surprise myself in Europe, I don't know, but if I want to do well at the world championships, at Beijing and be right up there among the best, realistically it's going to be in the steeples.

"In the 5000m, you've got to be running 15 minutes flat and under to be competitive and my PB is 15m 57s, so that's a huge chunk of time I have to find. I'm basically not fast enough at the moment."

McIlroy's personal best in the steeplechase is 9m 35s. The world record is 9m 01.59s but that was set by Russian Gulnara Samitova two years ago, a record which warrants some scepticism given that nobody has gone close to that since and the fastest time this year was the 9m 19.51s set by Ugandan Docus Inzikuru in winning the Commonwealth Games.

The Wellingtonian was pleased with how she raced in Melbourne, considering she fell ill in the week before the race, which forced her out of the village and left her weakened.

"It took the edge off me a fair bit. It left me bed-bound for four days which was so disappointing because I was in really good shape.

"It's easy to say if I was better, I could have won a medal but deep down, I genuinely think I could have run close to third."

McIlroy said the decision not to defend her world mountain running championship was made easier by the type of course offered in Bursa, Turkey, in September.

Each year the championships alternate between up-and-down and straight up courses. This year, runners will be going straight up, starting at altitude. Although McIlroy said that type of course probably suited her more than the up-and-down circuit on which she won in Wellington last year, the training would take too much sting out of her legs for her track campaign.

"I'd lose too much speed," she said. "I'm not that quick anyway."

McIlroy will be based this European summer in the Belgium city of Antwerp, along with a handful of other New Zealand athletes, including 1500m runner Paul Hamblyn, 800m specialist Jason Stewart and sprinter James Mortimer.