LAURA Muir struck gold in Glasgow last night - then marked golden moment by grabbing her Granny. Four years after she had fallen flat on her face at her home Commonwealth Games, the 25-year-old shrugged off the pressure of being the poster girl of these games, a blistering final lap at these familiar Emirates Arena surroundings leaving Germany’s Konstanze Klosterhalfen in her wake and seeing her finish in a time of 8.30.61 which was the fastest in the world this year and fully five seconds quicker than she had achieved when taking this title in Belgrade two years ago.

Merely the first leg of what she hopes will be a double double, what made it even more remarkable was the fact that Muir had little more than two hours to recover from her heat in the 1500m, which she won at a canter of 4.09.29. It was something of a marvel that this homegrown heroine still had enough energy to conduct an emotional lap of honour - union jack and saltire in hand - which included a hug from her grandmother, who had actually witnessed her winning a major tournament for a change. Muir has world indoor medals and both outdoor and European medals to her name already, but she reckons this one tops the lot.

“To get my first medals indoors was very special, but that was in Belgrade,” said Muir. “Then to get my first medals outdoors was very special, but that was in Berlin. Berlin was kind of tied with Glasgow which was quite nice – but it wasn’t IN Glasgow.

“So to be here and first time defending champion, having that orange bib and to be able to deliver with so much friends and family watching …. and my gran was there too and she always misses the races I win medals in,” added the 25-year-old. “She is always there when it doesn’t go quite so well. So I am so glad I could deliver today – it is the first time she has seen me win a championship medal.”

It was a schedule fraught with challenges for Muir, particularly when her 1500m heat was more arduous than she might have hoped for. Leaving the track at 7.14pm, and back on it at 9.37pm, all she had time for was the athletics equivalent of a pit stop and refuel.

“I just chilled out for 45 minutes, then had to warm up and come to the call room,” said Muir, who had worn the same Nike spikes which had caused minor controversy in Birmingham a fortnight ago. “I managed to drink a Powerade, eat a cereal bar, a gel, a banana. Andy [Young, her coach] wasn’t going to let me not eat anything, he was like: ‘Eat, eat, eat!’ I was so glad I didn’t get a stitch or anything!”

Her fellow competitors in the 3000m weren’t in a mood to make things easy for her, soon finding her countrywoman Eilish McColgan – hoping to defend her bronze from Belgrade - then Klosterhalfen, a redoubtable 22-year-old from Bonn, piling on the pressure. The German must have known the kick from Muir was coming but she couldn’t have expected this. Her last 200m was timed at a jaw-dropping 28.32 seconds; her last 1500m timed at 4.05. She was driven on by the noise of the crowd, who made it difficult to know exactly how far anyone was behind her, falling to the track in a familiar mixture of exhaustion and ecstasy. Klosterhalfen held it together, four seconds back, in second place, with Melissa Courtney from Wales getting third.

“I was going at a good pace, then Konstanze Klosterhalfen really ramped it up and I thought: ‘Oh Jeez’,” said Muir. “I knew I just had to hang on and then, in that last 200, I just put the welly down and gave it absolutely everything I’ve got.”

“The crowd was so loud I didn’t know where anyone was around me,” she said. “My mum, my dad, my gran, my best friends, pretty much all my training group is here, schoolfriends, aunts, uncles, cousins, school friends, family friends. I did well to get them all in.”

With McColgan – bemoaning three missed weeks of training with an illness - finishing back in seventh, one training partner who had to settle for a watching brief for the remainder of these championships is Jemma Reekie, the 20-year-old finishing sixth in a time of 4.13.44 in the second heat of the 1500m. Katarina Johnson-Thompson in the pentathlon was another golden girl on the night, finishing just shy of a world record after an 800m race where her fellow Brit Niamh Emerson collapsed on the line but still took silver.

But this was Muir’s night/.As if there was any doubt, the 25-year-old said the experience had banished any lingering misgivings about how things went down at Glasgow 2014. “I actually thought I dealt with the pressure really well in Glasgow – it was just that I got tripped in the last 100m,” she said. “But I took it quite hard. It did take me about six months to a year after that to get over it. But we thought ‘you know what, I love running, I am going to be as successful as I can be’.”

With a World Champs in Doha to come, and the Olympics looming in Tokyo in 2020, Muir is timing her run perfectly. But first there is the small matter of completing that double double on Sunday. “Having done two races in a couple of hours I now have 48 hours,” she said. “I don’t know what I am going to do with myself.”