PARALYMPIC DIARY:After the disappointment of failing to make the Olympics, I'm determined to retain the two gold medals I won in Beijing, writes JASON SMYTH

WE GOT to London yesterday having spent the past week in the Portuguese city of Coimbra. All the hard training has been done and now it’s just a matter of waiting for the games to start. At this stage there’s not a lot you can do outside of a few track sessions, a few recovery sessions and some physio and massage. Just really trying to get explosive and sharp.

Outside of that, we’ve been mostly just killing time. I’ve been rooming with Michael McKillop and we’ve been playing a fair bit of Fifa on the PlayStation. I say a fair bit, we’ve basically been spending every spare hour at it. I’m sure the rest of the camp has been wondering if we’re even here.

With my sight only being around 10 per cent as good as his, I play right up beside the screen. I sit probably less than a metre away from it. And actually, I hope Michael doesn’t read this because I’ll be giving away my tactics but basically I like to try and keep the play on the side of the pitch that’s closest to me so that the ball and the players are at the bottom of the screen. If it goes to the top of the screen, I get a little bit lost and that can’t be allowed to happen. As a Liverpool man, there can only ever be one winner when we play.

On the track, I feel I am back to something like my best form. Obviously things didn’t go so well a few months ago when I was trying to qualify for the Olympics. I took a bit of time to clear my head as much as anything before getting back into training for the Paralympics. It was obviously disappointing because I had made a lot of sacrifices to try and achieve qualification.

But all along, any time I was asked about it, I always made it clear that Paralympics was the priority. That’s where I get my funding, that’s where everything I’ve achieved has come from. I never lost sight of that and I knew that no matter what happened with the Olympics, I would be ready for the Paralympics. Nothing was going to get in the way of that.

So no matter how disappointed I was after missing out, it wasn’t long before I was back into a hard block of training for this coming fortnight. I never did beat myself up too much about missing out on the Olympics. I’m not really that sort of person. I generally get on with things and decide that maybe things happen for a reason.

The one bit positive that I took from it is that I’m going to London now more motivated than ever to retain the two gold medals I won in Beijing. You never know – I could have competed in the Olympics and maybe turned up for the Paralympics feeling overconfident. There’s no chance of that now.

If I try to examine what went wrong, I think there’s a chance that maybe I was almost trying too hard and the pressure got to me a bit.

I was forcing things instead of just letting it happen. I had to find just 0.06 of a second somewhere and I think maybe the fact that I was so close to it made me tighten up.

Looking back on it, I feel that I lost a bit of the enjoyment of running for whatever reason. Just before the Olympics, I was watching a documentary on Usain Bolt where he was messing about and smiling and basically being Usain Bolt. And it was like a switch flicked in my head. I said, ‘You know what? I haven’t actually enjoyed myself these last few months.’

I decided to get back to doing that. I know this shouldn’t feel like such a heavy weight. It shouldn’t be causing me such frustration. It should be something I enjoy doing. I know I’m in good shape, I know I can go out and run well and hopefully I can win. My first heat is next Friday, my first final is on Saturday. Between now and then, I’ll just have to stay relaxed.

I’m not too worried about expectation. I had expectation going into Beijing and it wasn’t a big problem. I know it’s going to be a bit different this time around because it’s pretty much a home crowd that will be surrounding us but you can’t pay too much attention to that. My family are arriving over on Wednesday so I’ll probably hang out with them for a while. They will make sure that there’s nothing strenuous about the week and they’ll keep me distracted.

There would be nothing worse than sitting here counting the seconds as they tick around on the clock. There’s only so much Fifa Michael and I can play after all.