The spill of time has softened her view of life. She reckons she'll handle it this time. Sonia at the Games. She'll be aware of Ireland and its hot ambition, but it'll be different this time. Fun (Part 1)

Funny, but not much psychology goes into it. What she does is simple. When she goes for her run on the morning of the race she thinks about the people in the race. What they will do and what she will do. What the different scenarios are and what she will do in the event of each scenario arising. Then she thinks about lunch.

Before the race she goes to the warm-up track. Before she goes jogging she lies down on her back for 10 minutes and puts her legs up in the air. She thinks about not being nervous. She thinks about what she wants to do in the race. She concentrates on relaxing. She wonders why her legs are in the air.

"I don't know why I put my legs in the air. I know I did it before the World Student games in Sheffield in 1991 and I won and I've been doing it ever since. There's no reason for it. I just think it's a good thing to do now. Not sure why."

That's about it for the thinking. Except that she thinks in a different way these days. The bouncers are letting all sorts of thoughts into her head. Just giving them the nod and waving them in. Unprecedented access.

In the spring, Sonia O'Sullivan was in Milan for a road race. The weekend had an air of strange lightness about it. Her mother came along to babysit her granddaughter Ciara and the organisers gave the older O'Sullivan a race number as an encouragement. Everyone laughed. On the day before the race an excursion was organised. A viewing of The Last Sup- per. Some antic instinct in Sonia made her decide to go. After all the times she had been in Milan and never seen anything but track, it just felt right.

"I didn't know when I'd get the chance to do that again. So I just put our names down and off we went." Last supper. The spill of time has softened her view of life, seeped the harsh monochrome out of it. She stops and smells the roses now. She usen't to know what colour roses were. She stood in the little room looking at Da Vinci's work and nothing in her life seemed so big or so bad any more.

She reckons she'll handle it this time. Sonia at the Games. RTE and the papers will make a sweeping production out of her races. Pubs will fill and people will cry or laugh and cheer. She'll be aware of Ireland and its hot ambition, but it'll be different this time. Fun. In Melbourne last Friday, she began to tidy her affairs. Imagine. She took her last long run before the Games, a relaxed 90-minute canter down along the lake striding onwards then to the city's famous track, The Tan, a dusty loop which takes runners four kilometres around the fragrant botanical gardens. Four years.

The last serious work before the Games, the final tidying. Everything afterwards would be countdown. She feels the excitement within her like a pregnancy. With each day now she expends less energy and feels more adrenaline growing in her chest. When she wants to, she will deliver her energy. A necessary penting. When she's ready.

Life is different now, what with age and an infant tugging at her sleeves. With a new partner who runs every stride with her, making her laugh when he begins to wheeze. A new coach, a new shoe company, new rivals. No point in even looking back.

No more laser vision. No more chasing down the vaulting talk of her native people who deemed her in turn to be unbeatable and then to be a nervous wreck. No more of that. Before 1996, as she freely confesses, Sonia O'Sullivan was an untreatable obsessive. She went to Atlanta with an enforcer's reputation, having smothered the confidence of every challenger. Four years later her troubles are a footnote in every Olympic record book. "Favourite O'Sullivan, suffering from intestinal disorder . . ."

Inexplicable. She had been so eerily dominant that Favourite might have been her Christian name. Favourite O'Sullivan. She stomped on so many fragile psyches. That she should came away from her scheduled coronation with her own career shattered was sufficient poetic justice for one athletic lifetime. She did what the great ones do, though. Took it all and nourished herself on it. She says now that when she thinks of Atlanta she thinks only of abstracts. Heat and fire, an impression of being trapped in a cauldron. And that's all. She doesn't think of it too often.

"Yeah. I feel like I am more in control of things now. Not the other way round. I can see things very realistically. I'm not off in my own world. I'm more aware of everything going on around me. Happier. This is a different time."

It's a bigger world than she thought it was and the past is a different country entirely. She did things differently there.

In early September she travelled south a day or two early. She'd done Brussels ("so, so") and done Gateshead ("great"), so she just took off. The long flight down to Australia gave literal weight to the metaphorical sense of journey she's had this past while. It's four years since she went to Atlanta with her head a rag-and-bone yard of worries and concealed anxieties, but this time is different. She had a bed as far as Singapore courtesy of British Airways. She slept like a baby. Nick tended Ciara. They arrived in Australia to a cold, rain-stained morning.

The Olympics were close enough to smell. She could almost reach out and touch the starting line. She thought about what she does. So simple.

"I try to stay as relaxed as I can for as long as I can. Warming up and strides. When they take you to the starting line, and put your stuff in the basket and take it away, then a minute starts to seem like a long time. They call your name out in the stadium and always when you hear it, it's like a shock and they stick that camera in your face and you think what do I do here now. Wave? Smile? Grit my teeth? Sometimes you don't see it there and that's probably when you are most into what you are doing. Usually you give a little wave. Then you crouch and the gun goes off and you forget about it all."

She was in Paris earlier this year doing a shoot for Nike, under whose wing she has been nestled for the past few years. The photographer wanted her leaning forward, straining every muscle, wanted her face looking as serious as she could make it. So Sonia leaned towards the lens and strained every muscle and each time she did so, out of nowhere, a traitorous smile would emerge to play on her lips. The snapper would duck out from behind his tripods.

"No! Serious. Serious. Serious. Starting line serious. Please Sonia. Serious! " Starting-line serious. If only he knew. She's had a summer of unevenly written prologue. It's been the oddest of times. People playing cat and mouse, people leaving graffiti in each others heads. If you're the sort who sees the glass as half full, well in many respects things have gone extraordinarily well for Sonia O'Sullivan. If you're a pessimist, there's something there for you too.

Her partner, Nick Bideau's legal battle with Cathy Freeman was a small distraction and O'Sullivan herself says that if she could rewrite the past few months she would change London, where a key 5,000 metres race in her preparations came undone. Ninth place and fifteen minutes and seventeen-point-four-two seconds worth of undoing.

"I came out of it fine, I suppose, but I should have either not run it, or should have maybe taken it easier beforehand and had a little more rest going into it. In the end, it didn't do anything for me except maybe give a little bit of a wake-up call to be a little more aware of how I was preparing before each race. That may have been the price on missing the year. Getting older you have to pay more attention to getting ready for races, getting just right."

For the optimists, there was Zurich. In Zurich everything was perfect. Before the race she went to the field across from the track and just jogged. She focused on the race and just went easy. "The run on the morning of the race is just about going out and getting some air to wake yourself up. Going into London, I felt pressured not to take it easy too much, the work I was doing had to be done, I had to look at Sydney. I worked hard. I didn't feel well on the Thursday. In Zurich I got it right."

Sometimes she has had to abandon thoughts of winning and merely bend her mind to the business of survival. She's run several races over distances she no longer specialises in. A top-class 1,500 metres these days is a question of hanging on and counting the lap speeds.

Earlier in the summer, she strongly fancied a crack at the 10,000 metres. She reckons with laps of a certain pace she can go on forever and still have a kick at the end. She went to the brink of deciding to concentrate on the longer distance, but in the end several factors and several voices hauled her back into the field for the 5,000 metres. The opportunity of early involvement was a key thing. The 10,000 comes late in the Games and she didn't fancy sitting around fretting while the hype bubble grew and grew.

"There were a few things. The 8.27 (3,000 metres) which I ran in Zurich felt really good. I treated that race like it was a championship race. Ran around, watched, and went. Not too different from a 5,000. I reckoned I could do as well in the 5,000. I have more experience at 5,000 and it's on first. I might as well get involved early. I didn't want to wait around for a week and see somebody finish third in the 5,000 who I might have beaten with my eyes closed. I didn't want that."

Strangely the pieces have fallen her way. The 5,000 metres will be a predominantly European race this time out. In that respect, the absence through injury of the Morrocan Zahra Ouaziz is another bonus. On her day Ouaziz is the quality African in the field and, more importantly, she is Gabriela Szabo's greatest ally, taking the field out at the sort of furious pace which suits the Romanian.