“I think it was good old parkrun, really,” says Georgia Bell, as she explains her extraordinary journey from occasional runner during lockdown to earning selection for Great Britain for the first time at the age of 30 – while also holding down a full-time job working with artificial intelligence. “I got back into enjoying running for fun and fitness. Then, when I started to feel a little bit fitter, I wanted to see how fast I could go.”
The answer, it turns out, was very fast indeed. Bell has won all six of her races this indoor season, and goes into the World Athletics Indoor Championships this weekend with the fourth fastest time in the women’s 1500m field this year, having set multiple personal bests.
The thing is, Bell always had talent. As a teenager, she was among the best 800m runners in the country, with a personal best of 2min 3sec. However, after repeatedly getting injured while at the University of California, Berkeley, she decided to quit the sport.
“I was the highest-ranked 800m runner for under-15 and under-17 in the UK, so the foundations were always there,” she says. “But once I finished my collegiate career, I just stopped running completely. The high-mileage philosophy out there didn’t work too well for me. Probably half the time I was in a boot injured and I never thought I would get back on a track again.
“But through the lockdown period, I did some parkruns, got into cycling and gradually just found my way back into doing a few races.”
After she ran a 16min 30sec parkrun, she decided to get in touch with her old coaches, Trevor Painter and Jenny Meadows, who have guided the 800m star Keely Hodgkinson to an Olympic silver medal. Under their watch Bell’s results have been spectacular, with her 1500m personal best coming down from 4:16 to 4:03 over the past year.
“I know Trevor always said to Jenny that I was the one that got away when I went to California,” she says. “He really wanted me to stay, and for us to work together, and so I think he was happy when I got back in touch.
“I’m based in London so he sets a lot of my sessions just remotely. But I will travel to Manchester to do some training with Keely and the team. It began just for fun, to see how fast I could go and now has really escalated with a world indoor spot and hopefully the Olympics this summer.”
Paris, she believes, is a realistic target. The only question is whether she will try to get there in the 800m, 1500m or 5,000m. “Me, Trev and Jen are trying to work out what distance athlete I am. There will be a bit of experimenting over the next few months.”
What makes Bell’s accomplishment even more impressive is that she combines training twice a day with her full-time job in cyber security. “We use machine learning and AI to plug into organisations and see how they are getting hacked basically. A lot of times companies come to us after they have a cyber attack, they get funding and need to get something in order to protect themselves.
“We work with companies all over the world. It’s a booming business, so it would be a big deal to walk away from it, but obviously the opportunity is very unique this year with Paris. It’s a big juggling act to make it all happen.”
Bell also credits riding around 100 miles a week – indoors on the Zwift app and outside on the roads going out of London and into Surrey – for the past three years as helping to build up her fitness. “I did the world duathlon championships last year in Ibiza and won that. I think I still will continue training that way but we need to prioritise being on the track and not getting knocked off my bike on the roads of London.”
Winning a medal will be tough in Glasgow given that she will go up against three Ethiopian stars, headed by the world mile record-holder Diribe Welteji, who have all run under four minutes this season. But having earned a second shot at a track career, Bell promises she intends to give it her all. “I’m going into races respecting everyone but not being afraid at all. A medal is something I am aiming for.”
But whatever happens, she promises to stick to Painter’s philosophy of having fun in races, even when the pressure is higher than ever before. “What he always says to me before I go in is: ‘Go and have some fun kid.’ So that’s what I try to do.”
