Lying horizontal in absolute agony, puffing heavily trying to get as much oxygen back into her lungs, Keely Hodgkinson is hurting.
She’s just completed a set of 400m training runs on the outdoor track at the Manchester Regional Arena right next door to Manchester City’s stadium. There is still some light blue ticker tape catching on the breeze left over from City’s send off to Pep Guardiola.
Hodgkinson doesn’t notice or care. Full on, flat out, pushing her body beyond limits mere mortals could tolerate.
But… the pain was worth it.
Keely Hodgkinson pictured during the World Athletics Indoor Championships in Torun earlier this year
Her coaches – husband and wife team Jenny Meadows and Trevor Painter – have spent about 30 seconds checking their stopwatches and they’ve just looked at one another. Surprise, astonishment, pride and huge smiles at what has just happened at one of Hodgkinson’s final training sessions before her outdoor season begins tonight (June 4) in Rome… she’s just smashed her personal best (PB) time in training for 400m split times.
This is one of the major milestones Hodgkinson and her coaches wanted to see in a training run in her assault to beat the oldest world record in athletics, the women’s 800m, which was set in 1983 by Czechoslovakia’s Jarmila Kratochvilova – it stands at an intimidating 1:53:28.
To beat a 43-year-old record Hodgkinson needs to have the pace over the first 400m to realistically challenge that time, that’s why these final training sessions in Manchester with the M11 coaching group run by Painter and Meadows are so crucial. Hodgkinson has what is regarded as a beautiful running style and on top of that she comes with grit, determination and sheer will to win, but even that is not always enough.
To break the world record and, in her words, achieve “world domination” she has to be fast over the first 400m of the 800m, but it has be controlled.
You can’t just sprint it and go all out, control is key so it must come with natural speed that has been worked on time and time again during the hard winter months of training, as well as right now as she finalises her preparations for the outdoor season.
As Hodgkinson lies on the floor still gasping for air, Meadows and Painter walk excitedly over; Hodgkinson’s PB for 400m in training – in what are known as 400m split times – has previously averaged 50.5 seconds. Meadows can’t contain herself, Painter has a huge grin as he holds out his stopwatch and notepad: Hodgkinson’s just run her 400m training runs at an average of 49.1 seconds!
Game on. Her 800m world record attempt is on, no more talking about it. Hodgkinson and her coaches have the evidence they now need. 1:53:28 is beatable.
Keely Hodgkinson is a six-time global medallist
I ask Meadows what has just happened. I’ve witnessed Hodgkinson run two very fast 400m split laps (400m laps run as 250m, short rest and then 150m, which is then repeated and repeated to calculate an average time), but I’ve no idea what’s going on. Meadows explains: “There’s not many times Keely can ever surprise us. Two split fours (400m laps) and she’s come out with an average of 49.1 (seconds).
“All along we’ve been trying to get to be able to run 50-something for a 400, then she would be seriously able to attack this world record.”
Painter chips in: “This is a huge day. It’s another factor where we actually go ‘we’ve got evidence this can happen’. It’s not us deluding ourselves. We’re realists with data analytics, you have to be especially when you’re chasing a record like this.
“She responds really well to stimulus, so we’ve been able to work for a month and a half before on this (speed work). It was an ideal window, let’s get you as fast as we can and see what happens.”
By now, Hodgkinson can breathe properly and has stood up. I ask her if she’s surprised by what she’s just run?
“I’m not very surprised because it’s been in the back of my head for the past two weeks,” she says. “I’ve been able to do the speed work that I’ve not been able to do for a while, which has put us in a great position… but it’s just nice to know that for my 800 that that’s there, whether it comes out or not. So yeah, we’re just in an exciting place, exciting times!
“For me, all this past year or two I’ve just learned to really enjoy the process, so when I came back into winter (training) I was happy to start fit and just watch myself get fit again and push the limits of what we’ve done.
“I’ve enjoyed seeing myself get faster and faster. A few little mental battles on the way with the speed, because of my injuries last year, but that’s part of it. For me, being an athlete and where I am now, it’s all about the process and how it comes together. That’s the real enjoyment. Big tick today. Very huge!”
Meadows’ broad smile shows no sign of disappearing, she knows the significance of Hodgkinson’s training runs. “Yeah, massive! It makes everything seem worthwhile,” she says.
“You get bad days sometimes where it’s not going well, you get attitudes from athletes, we’ve got conversations that we’ve got to pick up when we get home, physios need to be called, scans need to be booked, chaos… and then you get days like this.”
‘Days like this’ don’t come around very often and when they do it’s the result of months and months of hard work that no one really ever sees. At times monotonous, painful, boring and lonely.
“That dedication made Keely Hodgkinson the 800m Olympic champion at Paris 2024, it’s made her the hottest property in athletics and has made her the World Indoor champion and Indoor 800m world record holder in 2026.
Hodgkinson set a new championship record at the World Athletics Indoor Championships earlier this year
“Now she has the hard evidence in data from training. She doesn’t just hope to break the 800m women’s world record, she knows she can.”
Hodgkinson adds: “For me, I get all my confidence from training and from Trevor and Jenny, and from the evidence that we run on the track. Days like this is what make it all worth it – the headaches, the early mornings, the long days, the busy appointments, all this and that I really do put my life towards it. It just makes it worth it.
“Now my job is to go out and execute that in a race and make it real. I’ll take it as a really good challenge, it brings out the best in me. Hopefully, it’s a very exciting summer ahead. I feel like it’s going to be so.”
So when will a challenge to the oldest world record in athletics come? Clearly it’s been on the cards and in the minds of Hodgkinson and her coaches, but as they say, they go by the evidence.
Painter and Meadows believe if everything is in the right place then next month at the London Diamond League meeting could be the perfect setting for Hodgkinson.
“Well we know when she’d like to do it,” Meadows says. “She would love to do it this year in London at the Diamond League. She won there in 2024 which set her up for the Paris Olympic gold.
“She’d love to do it in the London Olympic Stadium with a British crowd.”
Painter put into context some other reasons why Hodgkinson can break the 800m world record and why it remains a daunting sporting challenge:
“Shoe technology has advanced so much, track technology has advanced a lot, our understanding of everything and the athletes’ understanding is growing all the time so it is getting closer and closer and I believe she believes she can do it now and I believe she can as well,” he says.
“You need so many factors to go right on the actual day, the weather needs to be great, you need a bit of a crowd behind you to give someone like Keely that lift and then you need the race to go the right way.”
Hodgkinson adds: “We’re trying to push limits this year. Courage has been my word of the year. Last year was freedom, this year it’s courage, so we’re trying to just be courageous. And that comes with risk – risk gets reward with courage.”
Now comes a note of caution. Breaking a world record set in 1983 is not a given and many have fallen in sport after high hopes.
“I think sometimes if you want things too much sometimes it can go wrong with things like that. I’m very much taking the approach this year of enjoying the process, taking it week by week seeing what my body can handle and can do and just seeing what results come with that,” Hodgkinson says. “On paper I’m still a second and a half away, which seems like a big chunk so I’m hoping to take some chunks off that this season.”
Should Hodgkinson break the 800m world record this year, or even in the next few years, she’s aware of the historical significance.
“I do feel like it would be really great history and I think it’s something a lot of people would enjoy to see, especially this generation of athletes that we’ve got,” Hodgkinson says. “The girls that we have right now have standards getting higher and higher every year. Everyone else is running faster, we’re just all running faster and we’ve got to start somewhere.
“It is something I do think about and something I would love to do. I’m definitely in the best shape mentally to do it, physically, but those kind of times that we’re talking about, every decimal point, every tenth matters.
“For me, I’ve always said that the world record is not a case of if, but when. I can’t always plan for when… I would say it’s in my sights and it’s something I see as breakable and achievable.”
Who set the 800m women’s world record and why has it stood since 1983?
Kratochvilova set the women’s 800m world record on July 26, 1983 in Munich.
Originally Kratochvilova was a 400m runner with the intention of doubling up with the 200m. Instead she ran an 800m race in 1983 and set the world record which has stood ever since: 1:53:28.
Over the past four decades some have described the record as toxic, with accusations of doping. However, while details are now known about the state-organised programme of East Germany, for example, in the former Czechoslovakia less is known about how athletes were coached and cared for in the 1970s and 1980s.
Now in her 70s, Kratochvilova has always vehemently denied she took performance enhancing drugs, insisting her performances on the track were down to the hard, physical work her coach Miroslav Kvac adopted, including her upbringing on a farm and a rigorous weight training regime.
In the intervening 43 years, no athlete has managed to get particularly close to Kratochvilov’s world record – no one has run under one minute and 54 seconds.
The second-fastest women’s 800m is largely forgotten: it was set by Nadezhda Olizarenko when running for the former Soviet Union (USSR) in 1980, who was only 15 hundredth’s of a second slower than Kratochvilova.
South African Caster Semenya’s fastest 800m is almost a second slower that the current world record. She ran that time in 2018.
Hodgkinson currently has two of the top 10 fastest 800m times – 7th & 10th fastest – and her best mark currently stands at 1:54:61, which is the UK national record.