Susan Smith has lost none of her confidence in setting difficult targets for herself as the beginning of the track season looms into view.

Having wintered in Atlanta, where she has been training for the last month with Olympic 100 metres champion and world record holder Donovan Bailey and 1995 World championship silver medallist Pauline Davis, Smith has now set her short-term sights on the Irish 100 metres hurdle record. Long term, the European championships in Budapest in August are her main concern.

Olive Burke's mark of 13.74 for the 100 metres hurdles, set in Morton Stadium, Dublin, in August 1987, has been sitting around long enough for Smith to believe that it's now within her grasp. Only an illegal wind speed at the end of last year prevented the World Championships 400 metres hurdle finalist from having it already.

The Cork City meet at the end of June is where Smith hopes to break the record, before she moves into her favoured 400 metres hurdles for the rest of the season.

"I'm hopeful of the 100 metres record. It's been around for a long time and I think I'm probably ready to do it now," she said yesterday.

Smith was out injured for a full six weeks from mid-March, which effectively wiped out most of the intensive training she had been doing in Atlanta throughout the winter. She has been back running now for only a month.

"I really should have known when I got the fracture," she says of the injury. "When I felt the pain, I didn't really know if it was a stress fracture or shin splints. I figured it was shin splints, before a bone scan revealed I'd four stress fractures in my shin.

"Once that happened I had to spend six weeks in a pool and on a bike. I'm not really a swimmer or a cyclist, and if I never see a pool again I'll be happy."

Smith's training, with the highly regarded coach Loren Seagrave, has taken on a more intensive character since he teamed up with Bailey. Although Seagrave takes his athletes at different times, the quality of Davis on the flat over 400 metres and the heightened atmosphere of seeing her coach on a daily basis has compensated, in part, for the lost weeks.

"My coach has just taken on Donovan Bailey, which makes him more available to me now. He's coaching me as well as Bailey every day. It is a help, because it's a great environment to be involved in and it's a small group. That means more attention, which helps.

"I hope to run in St Denis, Paris, next week and then onto the Europa Cup with Ireland. After that, there's not much happening until the Cork City event at the end of June.

"I might run in Austria and Switzerland and maybe in the Goodwill Games in July. But that will be by invitation. The trouble with my event is that there are only eight spots, and in Henglo last year there were only six. Unfortunately it's very hard to get into the races sometimes.

"But St Denis is really my first race. Training is very different from running a race and I really don't know what to expect until I get out there. But I'm going pretty well now, after a kind of slow start. I'm not really worried, because the major event of the year is not until August."

Smith has shown impressively steady progress over the last four years, making it to the semi-finals of the Atlanta Games before going one better to the final in the Athens World Championships last summer. Irish records have, inevitably, tumbled along the way.

Injury free, Smith may now seriously think of the possibility of a top three place in Budapest, and no one will doubt her. Last year her start to the year was hampered by sickness, so panic does not set in so easily.

"My times at training are better than they have ever been and I feel that I'm going better and better. I think I may be a little bit longer in getting to where I want to get to, but it's just a matter of getting a routine back again and getting used to running races."

A 400 metres hurdle time in the low 50s will be needed to join Sonia O'Sullivan as one of our current European medallists. St Denis may not tell us much next week, but, as the season unfolds, Smith's habit has, so far, been that of living up to her expectations.