SOME might have got as far away from the day job as possible; most, surely, would have headed for the beach, put their head down for a number of weeks and allowed the mental wounds to begin mending gently in the sun. Paula Radcliffe’s way of dealing with being the headline failure of the Athens Olympics was to get out there and run.

She has not taken a day’s holiday. She had to wait a week for her shattered body to be able to handle the physical demands of running again but, last Tuesday, for instance, she did an 80-minute session, the day before she did a track session in the morning and another run in the afternoon. She is with Gary Lough, her husband, in Flagstaff, a small Arizona town where barely anyone recognises her and where even fewer ask what happened in Athens. With the comfort of anonymity, she is preparing to race again. It is by doing again what she knows she does best that she feels she can give the healing process a real chance.

“If you go on holiday, you go to relax and be happy and I wasn’t in that state of mind,” she said. “I needed to get on with it and I wanted to get back running, my mind wanted to get back racing hard straight away. The only problem was that my body wasn’t able.”

Indeed, over a phone line from the United States, Radcliffe makes it abundantly clear that she intends to view Athens as a blip that she will do everything in her power to erase. The World Championships in Helsinki next summer stand out. What event, she is not sure, but she will be there. The Beijing Olympics in 2008, too.

Among the legions of experts who have been located for an opinion, a small army has wondered whether she would ever be the dominant force in women’s distance running again. Radcliffe is unfazed by this argument. The Olympic dream? “There’s still plenty of opportunity to do that,” she replied. “I’ve never doubted the fact that I will be back and that I will be able to run as well as I had done before.”

This may sound like a woman in control of the traumas after that most public of Olympic disappointments, but Radcliffe knows that she is by no means over it, she concedes that she may never be and that she had to flee to the United States to give herself a chance.

She had wanted to stay at home longer. After Athens, she went to her parents house in Bedford and then to her own home in Loughborough, but found herself “getting into a depresssed state”. She says that she felt “ashamed” (“irrationally, because I knew I’d done my best, but I did feel it”) and it took her a week before she was prepared to go out. “I didn’t read all the papers — I couldn’t have handled that — but I knew what was going on,” she said. “It had got to the stage where the papers were running polls on whether I should run the 10,000 metres. So I knew what was going to happen.”

Her first time out of the house was for a run, the second was to go to the supermarket. “I had people coming up a lot, I just about managed to get my trolley round without a crowd,” she said. “I don’t want to criticise — the majority were very kind, supportive — but they were prolonging the agony, making it a lot harder to get over. It was always there. There was no getting away from this big, whole ‘Olympics disaster’ thing. And it will be there for a while. But certain things make it easier to get over it, like being anonymous.

“So I left the country. It had been made into such a big deal. You have to distance yourself from it and put things into perspective and that’s hard when everybody’s coming up and acting like someone’s just died.”

It is interesting to hear Radcliffe using such language, because one of the criticisms she faced is that she had become such a single-track vehicle for athletic success and that she had lost perspective herself. Is she too cocooned?

“Things have to change because of your situation,” is her response. “When I was a kid, if I had a bad run, I’d ignore it and the next day I could do what I wanted and the whole nation wouldn’t be judging me and making me a front-page story. Life has got to change a little bit.”

Among her supporters, Kelly Holmes is still regularly texting her, Steve Cram, Ingrid Kristiansen and Denise Lewis have been particularly helpful and Darren Campbell “gave me a big hug and said, ‘You’re a champion and you always will be’.” A phone call from Charlie Spedding, the 1984 London Marathon winner, summed it up. He said that he had been inundated with media callers asking what he thought had happened to her, why and whether she would ever be the same again. His answer — which he reserved for her alone — was that he believed she would be back, as strong as ever.

This is Radcliffe’s belief, too, but to sustain it, she just wants to get out there and run. She is doing plenty of that in Flagstaff, but then she wants a race. Not a race where people are lining up to judge her, to assess whether she is as good as new, but where she can simply enjoy the business of racing. Thus she will compete in Run London, a ten-kilometres race on November 28. Before that, her autobiography will be published — Paula: My Story So Far — the implication being that there is plenty more to come.

There was nothing final about Athens, at least that is her theme. “I can’t keep dwelling on it,” she said defiantly. “It probably will stay with me. But I’m not going to let it stop me being the person I am. I am not going to let it destroy me.”