Until last weekend, there’s a fair chance you may not have heard the name Sarah Calvert.
Now there’s little prospect of the 24-year-old post-grad medicine student going under the radar. Her spectacular arrival on the British middle-distance scene has changed everything.
The Livingston native is Scotland’s new UK 1500m champion after pipping Olympic silver medallist Laura Muir to the title in Birmingham.
“It feels incredible,” said Calvert. “I did not expect this ever to happen, but especially not with being busy in May studying for exams, that was pretty stressful for me.
“As soon as I crossed the line I knew it was crazy. I knew this was the biggest moment of my life. Afterwards I had my first anti-doping test, so that was another good experience.
“Since then I’ve had so many messages from people from school, from all my friends, from my parents’ friends. It makes it all seem very special.”
Calvert’s sporting status is such that she is now chasing fast races in Europe to try to make the British team for next month’s World Championships.
It’s her social status that has taken her, and her family, by surprise due to her newly found fame.
“My dad sent me a text yesterday to tell me I’ve got a Wikipedia page now,” she told BBC Scotland at Edinburgh’s Meadowbank stadium, one of her regular training venues when she gives herself a break from her studies at Edinburgh University.
“It’s just kind of insane. I didn’t really expect it to blow up like this.”
Winning one of the top events in the UK calendar will do that kind of thing for your profile.
She now has an agent who is hunting down races to see if she can take six seconds off her personal best and run herself into the GB team for Tokyo in September.
And while Calvert is ready to give it her best shot, her life amid the chaos at the moment is still grounded in reality. She wants to be a doctor, as well as an athlete, and has tried to walk the fine line between excelling at both.
“Before last weekend I would have said absolutely no chance,” she conceded of making the World Championships. “It still seems pretty far off because I need to run a big personal best. I think I just have to go for it.
“I definitely feel busy, day to day, when I’m at uni. Training in the morning, cycling to hospital for my placement and then training in the evening again. But I enjoy both.
“I often worry that I’m compromising running for medicine and then the other way around, but I think I just have to accept that I want to be a runner and I want to be a doctor at some point in my life.
“So for now the best way for me to do it is to combine the two. I rarely have to miss training for medicine so I think I make it work pretty well.”
