Laura Muir is, by her own admission, a statistics person.

She looks at everything analytically and, as much as possible, makes sure all the loose ends are tied up.

It’s this mindset that means when she looks at her own CV, she’s immediately drawn to the one, lone gap that remains.

As a medallist at every major athletics championship in the calendar, the single hole yet to be filled is a major global title.

In the coming six months, Muir has two chances to put that right and tie up the final loose end of a career that, already, has guaranteed the 30-year-old is considered one of the greatest Scottish athletes of all time.

Despite all of her achievements, Muir remains remarkably understated but, when pushed, even she admits she’d like to tick off that one last target.

“When I first started out in my career, I wanted to compete in all six major championships. I did that, so then I wanted to make the final at all six championships. Then I did that too so I wanted to win a medal at all six and I’ve done that now. So now, it’s about can I make all of those six gold?,” Muir says. 

“I’m a very statty person and I like things to be neat and sewn up. I’ve got the full set of medals so the one thing that’s missing is a global title. 

“Don’t get me wrong, if I retired tomorrow, I’d be very happy with what I’ve achieved but having a global title would just finish that set off.

“It’s a very difficult time to be trying to win a global title in my event but I’m absolutely going to be going for it.”

The two major events in which Muir is targeting gold this year are the World Indoor Championships, which take place next month just minutes from her flat in Glasgow, and this summer’s Olympic Games in Paris.

Muir’s reference to it being a “difficult time” to win a medal in her event is yet another example of her understated nature; the women’s 1500m is currently stronger than it’s ever been and in Kenya’s Faith Kipyegon, boasts the greatest runner in the event’s history.

Muir is well aware that in the current climate of the 1500m, to stand still is to go backwards.

The Herald: Laura Muir

Despite being the fastest British woman ever over the distance, Muir knows that the constant and rapid advancement of her event globally means unless she finds a way this year to go faster than she ever has, that global title will likely remain out of her reach.

However, Muir believes she can manage something that’s relatively uncommon in elite sport and that’s get faster in her 30s.

Last year didn’t only see Muir turn 30, it also saw her split with her long-time coach, Andy Young.

She had worked with Young since her teens and so the split, which came astonishingly suddenly, came as a surprise to most observers and meant she was coachless for some months.

Her 2023 season was by no means a disappointment – claiming the British mile record that she’d long strived for was a particular highlight – but she admitted at the time that the disruption was far from ideal.

A sixth place in last year’s World Championships 1500m final was yet another solid result for Muir to add to her record but it highlighted that, if she’s to win that global title at any point this year or beyond, she has to get faster.

Having teamed up with Steve Vernon last summer, who is also UK Athletics’ head of endurance, Muir has transformed her training.

For someone who has won Olympic silver and World bronze, as well as Commonwealth and European gold in recent seasons, the prospect of throwing everything she knew out the window could have been viewed as a risk not with taking.

But Muir saw the prospect of change in an entirely different light.

“I’d plateaued at 3 minutes 54 or 55 seconds and, as much as that’s a good place to plateau, that’s just not going to cut it in the 1500m now,” she says.

“So I said to Steve, I want to make changes because I want to get faster. I felt like I had nothing to lose so we’ve made a lot of changes.

“Pretty much every aspect of my training is different and that’s been really refreshing. 

“I’m hoping that I have a lot of years left of running competitively so it’s nice to know that even at my age, there’s so many things I can get better at.

“It’s quite unusual to be at this point in your career and still have so much room to improve but I’d not had any new stimulus for a decade so to have that has been great because I’ve responded really well to it.

“It has been challenging doing different training – I’m in the gym a lot more now.

“So it’s been great to have an insight into what I can still do in this sport, hopefully starting this year.”

The Herald: Laura Muir in action

Muir’s first real test will come tomorrow, at the Millrose Games in New York where the Dundonian will defend the Wanamaker Mile title she won for the first time last year.

It’s far from a low-key opening to Muir’s season but with only three indoor races on her schedule this year – after New York, she’ll head to the British Championships then the World Indoors – she’s looking to set down a marker for the year immediately.

“My winter’s been good – I was lucky to escape to the sun in January to South Africa and I got a good, solid month of training and got a lot of good quality work in,” she says.
“The racing is the fun bit so it’ll be nice to be back in the competitive environment. And it’ll let me see where I’m at ahead of this summer.

“I’m really excited to race in New York again – it’s such a cool environment because the crowd is right on the rails and I loved that last year. 

“Plus there’s great competition and it’s a big one so hopefully I can race well.

“I’m one of those people who can normally hit the ground running from my first race so I’m hoping what I’ve been doing in training can translate into my racing quite quickly.”

Muir’s recent success – six major championship medals since 2020 - is remarkable by anyone’s standards and has seen the perception of her transform entirely from that which engulfed the early part of her career.

As a young athlete, Muir was seen as someone with heaps of potential but who could not translate that into silverware. Five times in the space of five years between 2014 and 2019, Muir was in contention for major championship silverware yet never quite made it onto the podium.

So to now be in the position whereby she’s viewed by the public as someone who’s a banker for a medal must be quite a burden?

“When people expect me to do well, I see that more as a support than a pressure now,” Muir says. 

“If I’ve reached a level where people are presuming I’m going to do well, it’s a pretty good position to be in.

“That does bring pressure but I see it much more as a positive thing than a negative – I’d much rather people assume I’m going to do well than assume I’m not going to do well.

“I do still get nervous so it’s about controlling those nerves to the extent that they don’t impact my performance.

“In 2014 (at Glasgow 2014), I allowed those nerves to overwhelm me and I wasn’t able to compete at the level I knew I could and that’s really frustrating.

“When I started taking a more relaxed approach to things, I performed a lot better so that’s the approach I try to take now so even though the pressure is there, I know if I want to do well, I just can’t let the pressure get to me.”

Olympic gold is, of course, Muir’s ultimate dream.

The major obstacle to securing that ultimate prize is Kipyegon, the reigning World and Olympic champion and world record holder but also running astonishingly fast is the Netherlands’ Sifan Hassan and Ethiopia’s Diribe Welteji.

In the same way that Andy Murray was both blessed and cursed to be playing tennis in the greatest era of his sport, Muir is battling similar challenges.

But rather than become obsessed with others, Muir lives by the athlete cliché of focusing only on herself.

And she’s able to appreciate that in competing in her event’s strongest era ever, the advantages of that probably outweigh the negatives.

“I definitely think being in this era has made me a better athlete. People look back on Murray’s era of tennis and talk about how amazing it was and even if he wasn’t right at the top in that era, it’s amazing to be a part of it and people still recognise what he’s done and hopefully that’ll happen with this era of 1500m running too,” she says.

“In my daily training, I tend not to think about other people because that’d cause too many distractions. All I’m in control of is myself and even though we all compete in the same event, we all come at it from very different angles. So I don’t worry about what anyone else is doing.

Then when it comes to race day, that’s when I start thinking ok, how do I really attack this?”

While the Olympic Games this summer is, without question, Muir’s primary target, she admits the World Indoors are more prominent in her thoughts than they perhaps would otherwise have been due to Glasgow being the host.

She will step up to the 3000m next month and while Olympic gold would trump all else, gold on home soil would be a nice interlude on her way to Paris.

“It’s so special to have these World Indoors in Glasgow because we’re not going to have an Olympics in Scotland any time soon, or even a World Champs so within my career, this might be my one chance to win a global title on Scottish soil,” she says. 

“So it’s very exciting to think I could bring home another global medal. 

“It’s going to be incredibly tough and I need to frame it as a stepping-stone to Paris but I’m certainly going to go out there and do the best I can in Glasgow.”