Jo Pavey shelves retirement and targets fifth Olympics

A year ago the 41-year-old had retirement plans in her mind but went on to claim European 10,000m gold and 5000m bronze at the Commonwealth Games.

Since then Pavey's calendar has been anything but empty as she seeks to claim an historic third Great Manchester Run crown later this year. And her return to the road will be juggled with plenty of expeditions on the track as she seeks to secure her spot at next summer's Olympic Games.

But while she knows qualification for Rio will not be simple, she admits her successes in 2014 have given her the drive to keep pushing.

"At the start of 2014 I definitely had in my mind that it would be my final year," she said.

"This year I'm really excited about doing a combination of road and track because last year, with coming back from having a baby and being up against time to try and qualify for both championships, that took up all the time and I didn't really get chance to road race.

"So this year I really want to focus on doing track and road and then I see 2016 to be a really full-on track year because it’s going to be all about trying to qualify for the Olympics.

"I think I was just really pleased (with results in 2014 )to see that I could still be competitive. I didn’t know whether that would be possible.

"Then I started to have thoughts about whether I could get in the Olympic team for 2016 and I'm targeting trying to do that but I’m not complacent about it, because you can't just want to do an Olympics, you've got to qualify and there's a lot of good young girls coming through and obviously I'm getting older and older.

"I'm not saying I could easily get on the team, it's just something I would aim to try and do and it just makes it feel that it might be a possibility."

© Sportsbeat 2015