IT has been a rollercoaster first half of the year for Laura Muir, featuring

frantic swotting for final vet exams and helter skelter midnight cross-country taxi rides through the snow. So perhaps it is appropriate this unlikely adrenaline junkie has permitted herself seven days of rest and recovery in the theme parks of California next week to get back up to speed for a summer which culminates in the European Athletics Championships in Berlin in August.

Having picked up her first global medals, a silver and a bronze, at the World Indoor Championships in early March, this Perthshire phenomenon skipped the C ommonwealth Games in the Gold Coast in favour of completing her course at the Glasgow vet school, the last exam of which was over and done with last Monday.

As it happens, she will only discover whether she has passed them with flying colours or not as she soaks up the high-octane thrills of Six Flags and Universal Studios in the company of her coach Andy Young. Then it is a case of working out how Britain’s highest profile vet since James Herriot can go even faster now she is finally able to hang up her stethoscope for a season or two.

“Have there been wild parties since I finished?” said Muir. “No, I have pretty much slept. I was absolutely shattered so I have been in bed early every night.

“My birthday was four days before my finals, so I didn’t really do anything at all,” she added. “My parents took me out for dinner, which was nice. What did I get? I said I didn’t want to do a grass session and Andy switched it to indoors. He thinks that was a present!

“The results will come in through an online university portal. I will be in America next week, but luckily I will still be able to get them. I think it is Wednesday next week, that is when they have the board meeting. So I might actually be on a rollercoaster when I get my results! Veterinary is slightly different, you can either get honours, commendation or just a pass. It goes on an average of all your different years’ marks. As long as I get a pass I will be happy.”

It takes a robotic quality to sacrifice normal human interaction and push yourself consistently to the limit, but Muir is honest enough to admit the last few months have taken a human toll on her energy levels. “Having my finals did take a lot out of me,” she said. “The past couple of months have been stressful, but that is expected with having exams.

I just need a week or so to kind of recover a bit more.

“I train six days a week, every week. In the run-up to my exams, I managed to do that every week, I didn’t miss any training at all.

“Up to a point, I’ve enjoyed it.

A couple of years ago, with the course, it wasn’t too busy. But the past year has been really busy in terms of working all day, at least eight till five, eight till six, then you would have nightshifts, you’d be on call, working weekends.

“When I was on a few rotations, on call at eight at night or 12 at night, you have to stay overnight, so I would run round the campus with my phone on, in case any emergencies came in. I told them ‘right, I’m only five minutes away if there’s an emergency, I’m just

looping around the campus, so I can run back if needed’.

“I worked three out of four weekends in April, in the lead-up to my exams. So that’s a bit too much. But you know what your priorities are. The veterinary studies are very important to me, so is my running. I just didn’t have any free time. If I can get a bit more rest and recovery I will be back on track and where I want to be for the summer.”

Muir was speaking yesterday as she was announced as an ambassador for the European Indoor Championships in her home track at the Emirates Arena in Glasgow next March. It is at least one venue where she might be able to get a taxi to the competition without getting stung with a whopping £1500 fare.

“I am really excited to be named an ambassador,” said Muir. “The European Indoor Athletics Championships were the event where I won my first international medals, I got a double gold [in Belgrade in 2017]. For it to be at the venue where I train pretty much every week, and race in a lot as well, I feel so at home in this arena and I am just so excited for the championships to come here. Picking up that home support again, you just don’t want to miss it.”

The 25-year-old from Milnathort has plenty to be getting on with before then, mind you. Once that trip to

California is out the way, her outdoor season begins in earnest with a Diamond League outing at Eugene, Oregon. While she has yet to decide upon whether to put her name forward for the World Cup, an innovation on the athletics calendar which will take place at the London Stadium in mid-July, things will reach a head at the European Championships in Berlin in August, the only strand of the multi-sport event which won’t take place in Glasgow.

The world is used to seeing double portions of Muir at the major championships. Unfortunately, having racked up double European Indoors gold in Belgrade at 1500m and 3000m in 2017, then picked up silver and bronze at world level in Birmingham in March, the schedule for this August works against her plans for further world dominance. With both the 1500m and 5000m finals scheduled within 15 minutes of each other on the final day, and the 1500m heats scheduled for lunchtime on the day of the 800m final, this versatile athlete will limit herself to just one event, almost certainly her favoured 1500m. At least some of her usual rivals, the likes of Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands and home heroine Konstanze Klosterhalfen, are in the same boat.

“I have done the triple double now,” said Muir. “So I think I will be happy just to do the one event. There are a lot of European girls very high up in the world rankings, not just Hassan. I don’t know what distance everybody is doing. I don’t even know what distance I’ll be doing yet.”

As for the Commonwealth Games, being otherwise occupied on a placement at animal hospital for most of the time helped keep her mind off it, but she admits that there were times when it was “a kick in the teeth” not to be able to take part.

This was most often when she was training in the pitch black at 6am in the rain and the mercury was rising to 30 degrees on the other side of the world. Or when visitors to Team Scotland’s holding camp at the sunshine coast were greeted by an immediate photo opportunity with a koala.

“I was on placement at an animal hospital at the time so it was only when I was on a lunch break or something that I managed to catch a bit of it,” she added.

“I saw that Jake [Wightman] had done really well and I watched Eilidh [Doyle’s] race. I thought the Scottish team did very well without me, I was really proud of how they did out there.

“I had mentally accepted it quite a while ago – I knew it wasn’t going to work out. But even still it was a bit of a kick in the teeth not to be out there. Especially in April, the weather was quite rotten here at some points, and there were all the nice sunny pictures. And nobody mentioned that there were koalas involved!”