Barely six weeks after she cut a crushed figure in Beijing as her Olympic dream turned sour once more, Paula Radcliffe will take to the streets again in the New York City Marathon next month. “I am not going there for redemption,” Radcliffe insisted yesterday. Can she win? “Definitely.”

Just as happened in 2004, after the travails of the Athens Games, Radcliffe is using New York to put the Olympics behind her and refusing to claim any sort of triumph from her battle with her body in China. “Once I'd got over the mental disappointment of missing out on another Olympics, of almost thinking the Olympics are against me, physically it was just like getting over the effects of a bad training run,” she said.

People will long debate Radcliffe's wisdom in going to Beijing, but it was a long shot worth taking. After having a stress fracture diagnosed in her left femur in May, she had barely run outdoors when she went to China and laboured home in 23rd place. The brutality of the marathon was captured in her embrace with Liz Yelling, her old friend, who had a suspected broken rib and bloodied arm after a fall. Radcliffe said that she had effectively been running on one leg and the pair were united in a gory brand of glory. Not that she saw it like that.

When asked if it ranked up there with her best races for different reasons, Radcliffe said: “Not to me, no. I didn't run as well as I'd hoped out there, even with the build-up. If you had a crystal ball and knew what was going to happen, that plainly you hadn't done enough to run well there, then maybe I would have thought differently about it. But you can't do that - it's the Olympic Games.”

Radcliffe, 34, has won the New York City Marathon twice, is the world record-holder and believes that she can run 2hr 15min again if her build-up is as perfect as the conditions. The London Games in 2012 remain on the horizon, but for the first time she acknowledged that Olympic gold may be beyond her.

“I don't think my Olympic career is over, but I know that probably the best years for achieving it [a gold medal] might have gone,” she said. “You have to come to terms with the fact that maybe my career might finish and I haven't achieved what I think I'm capable of. It would be hard to have that missing from my career, but I don't think I need it to define my career or to define me.”

Indeed, while her latest comeback on November 2 may hint at her obsessive core, she explained that she is running for love rather than glory. “I came back from a run last night and said to Gary [her husband], ‘I'm just loving it at the moment.' That means a lot to me, more than all of the fame associated with doing well at the Olympics.”

Radcliffe took five days off after Beijing and helped her daughter, Isla, to learn to swim. She was sick of training in a pool and on a treadmill and could not wait to start running. Yet she felt some tightness in her calf and a scan showed some inflammation around the base of the spine. She has since spent five weeks doing strengthening work, after a year of being unable to lift weights, and feels she is in better shape than when she came back from a 21-month layoff in the BUPA Great North Run in October last year. She added that she may take a race before New York as a warm-up.

Kenenisa Bekele, the double Olympic champion, has withdrawn from the BUPA Great North Miles meeting on Tyneside on Saturday. The Ethiopian, the first athlete to complete an Olympic 5,000 metres and 10,000 metres double for 28 years in Beijing, has had little chance to train.

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