Following Painter and Meadows’ plans – which over the last six months have resulted in frighteningly quick improvements – her preparation has included extended warm-weather training stints with a group of other British athletes in South Africa. There, among Painter’s other protégés, she was the only athlete also holding down a full-time job, ‘getting up at 6am to do some work, and fitting in calls between training’.
Now on sabbatical, ‘with the laptop slammed shut’, at the age of 30, Bell can finally live the life of a professional athlete aiming for her first Olympics. A dream once thought dashed was, it turns out, just deferred.
She lives in south London with her fiancé, ‘a very good amateur’ cyclist and often her training partner, and for the moment lives according to a routine she admits is ‘very monotonous’: after 10 hours of sleep, she’s up at around 9am, has a black coffee and scrambled eggs with peppers and tomatoes, goes to training, then has a lunch of chicken, rice and vegetables, has a mid-afternoon snack of some peanut butter on toast with a banana, trains again, then eats ‘something like salmon and vegetables’ for dinner.
Currently she’s doing 30 miles of running, 100 miles of indoor cycling, and two hours of gym per week. ‘If you’re preparing for a race, you just want to keep to things that you know work,’ she says. During downtime, she’ll stretch, or have an ice bath, or sleep. ‘It’s a boring lifestyle,’ she says, with a laugh. ‘One thing I’ve noticed is that professional athletes are so active but, when they’re not competing, they’re just… slothlike. And I get why.’
I think I know the answer to this but… any booze? ‘No, no. Nothing until after the Olympic trials. But I’ll have a glass of Champagne if I make the Olympics, obviously.’
There is currently a frustrating gap between grassroots participation and professional support in athletics. Thanks in part to Instagram, which is full to the brim with preposterously good-looking fitness influencers capturing their marathon plans and hawking high-end kit, running has become cool of late. For Generation Z in major cities, ‘Friday night runclub’, complete with coaches leading the charge with boomboxes strapped to their backs, is the new actual clubbing.
The phenomenon of Parkrun has helped too, of course. ‘Which is great, but everyone is interested in my 5K time [the length of a Parkrun] and so impressed, when my time for the 1,500 metres is way more impressive…’
The whole Bell family does Parkruns together sometimes, including on Christmas Day. Occasionally they’ll be racing some big names.
‘Yes,’ Angela chips in, ‘your dad beat Seb Coe once, I think.’
Bell’s face screws up. ‘Um, I don’t think he was trying his hardest…’
She just wishes that public enthusiasm carried on to the top level. ‘A lot of my friends don’t even know who’s favourite to win Olympic gold this summer. They know the football stars, the tennis players, the Lionesses… but not track. So people can appreciate running but not the top level, there’s a disconnect… It’d be cool if everybody followed our stories.’
That, she hopes, will change this summer. And with likeable personalities with inspirational stories like hers in the running, it may well do. First, she’s got to get there, and make the most of that sabbatical. If she keeps on at this rate, though, she may well need to extend it.
‘I’m just going to race and have fun, and we’ll see,’ she says. One good thing, she adds, is that her initials are GB. ‘So at any international event it always feels like absolutely everybody is cheering me on.’
This summer, whatever happens, we’re all Team GB. And even on the greatest stage, she can give herself that most contemporary of pep talks: remember, you could be doing back-to-back Zoom calls.
