Last Monday night, with an Olympic medal in her grasp at last, she got to bed at 3 a.m. She'd had one beer. She felt good. The deeds of the day had stolen her energy. Her head wouldn't switch off, though. At 3.20 a.m. she was up again. Something had to give. She took a sleeping pill and slept until RTE and Pat Hickey came knocking early in the morning. Little wonder that her head buzzed so insistently. She was a different woman. Even in the best moments of the past few years and there have been great times, she has never seemed to be on anything but brief parole from her self-doubts. Only one thing was going to solve it for her.

An Olympics. She picked the best night, the toughest night. Stadium Australia packed right to the brim, with 6,000 more people in it than have been there any other time this week. Cathy Freeman, a darling of the Games and a cloud in Sonia's mind, was out on the track just before her. It was an evening fraught with potential complications, a night when she could have been dismantled all over again.

Sonia came. Saw. Doubted. Conquered. When she came off she knew what had been done. She'd won more than a medal. She had won her old self back.

You could sense it in her speech. Years ago when she was a runner in bloom she never spoke about running. She spoke about racing. Every occasion, no matter how grand was "just racin' " Until Atlanta she never met a race she didn't like. For a woman who would fight to the death over a game of scrabble racing was the bread of life.

Than that left her and she spoke about focus and motivation; about races she realised she didn't want to be in half way through and races she discovered she was enjoying. Then last Monday she crossed the finish line in Sydney and her first words were "so close, so close".

The silver fulfilled her, but her old self was back. She knew this was a race.

"Straight afterwards for me it was just a race. You get beaten and it doesn't matter what it is for, it's a race. You race to see who will win. Later, I realised I have an Olympic medal and it took a lot of worries away but when I finished I was a little bit disappointed but I knew the bug or whatever it is was back."

Later she understood the mechanics of the race a little better. "Szabo has been racing non-stop, that made a difference, she's used to winning. There was a time when I was used to winning and perhaps I would have done the same and gone a little earlier. We both came around the last 200 metres going as fast as we could. I don't think there was anything more than either of us could have done." There was never really much chance that she wasn't going to run in tomorrow's 10,000. Before the 5,000 she was saying that if it went well she'd try the 10,000 with nothing to lose. Yet if she'd lost badly and contemplated another four years before she'd have a chance again she'd have crawled on hands and knees to the start line of the heats. That's the nature of the beast.

Most of her training all summer was geared towards the event anyway. Tuesday nights in the park with her coach Alan Storey were conducted with the unspoken knowledge that she was going to the compete in the 10,000. Even as late as the week of the National Championships in Santry in August she began the week thinking of doing the 10,000 metres only. It was then that her partner Nick Bideau persuaded her of the undesirability of sitting in the suburbs watching a nonentity winning a cheap medal in the 5,000.

For tomorrow the challenge is mental as much as anything. She competes in an extraordinarily competitive field which includes the last two Olympic champions. It is expected that Paula Radcliffe will go off early as usual, hoping to burn the field away. For Sonia, as long as the legs obey, that will be a positive - she needs to get into the business end of the race as quickly as possible. The 5,000 metres final flashed as clear a warning as possible that every little break has to be tended to and watched. She has spent the week regrouping, getting her mind back on the future rather than the highlights reel of Monday night. On Tuesday she had a day which was not conducive to getting the mind right for a race. RTE and Pat Hickey left and she took a jog with Nick. The phone kept hopping, some washing had to be done, flights home needed confirming, she was required in the Nike offices at 2 p.m. for a press conference.

She went as far as the press conference and then decided to take control again. There was some pressure to attend an event which Dr Jim McDaid was holding for Irish athletes, more pressure to go to Bondi Junction and put in an appearance, medal and all, at the Irish House there. She pulled the pin on both events and got an early night. It's been nothing but massages, gentle jogs and Ciara ever since.

She has flashed a warning. The old Sonia is back. Tomorrow she is capable of cruising through 24 laps and then turning in a 60-second final circuit. The entire field will fear her pace. She was 8 to 1 in the betting last week and now she has shortened drastically to 7 to 2. After the favourites Derartu Tulu and Gete Wami. She gives the impression that she will relish this one.

"You just don't wave goodbye to opportunities. You realise you're in shape and you run well. I've hardly done anything hard for four weeks so I'm fresh and ready to go."

For mental ammunition she need only look back as far as the spring. She ran a road race in Milan and beat Tegla Loroupe and Tulu well. In a five-mile race in Holland the following month she was effortlessly one second away from Paula Radcliffe's course record. There is only the mental struggle avoiding the feeling that she's got an Olympic medal, and in that sense it's all over.

"I don't think it will be like that. You don't have many of these races in your career. When I have this feeling I usually race well."

Her history confirms that. The World Championships in Stuttgart when she came back and split the Chinese. Morocco and the World Cross Country championships on successive days. Budapest and the 5,000 and 10,000 Europeans nailed down. If you doubted, well you knew for sure that Sonia had her groove back when you saw her handle the 10,000 metres heats on Wednesday. She was relaxed and thinking ahead. When Sonia has doubts she races against them like she did in heats in both Atlanta and the World Championships in Athens. She bust herself in heats because she wasn't sure and she had to know.

Bideau feels that even last Friday night in the heats of the 5,000 the certainty hadn't returned. She had to put the foot to the floor just once and finish in a sprint.

"On Friday night she wanted to test her speed. When Sonia is confident she hasn't any need to do that. If somebody goes she just says `see you later'. On Friday I think she just wanted to see what speed was there. In the 10,000 heats she was running in flats again, but she knew. No need to fool around. She just jogged around. I saw her taking a look at the crowd, looking at the time. I thought she looked like she was just a bit late for a bus. "When she's confident," he adds, "she's fearless."

It's her nature.