The end is far from nigh for Commonwealth bronze medallist Jo Pavey, who says plans to hang up her running shoes have all-but disappeared. 

The 41-year-old began 2014 with retirement plans firmly in mind but ten days of success that saw her take 5000m bronze in Glasgow and 10,000m gold at the European Championships put an end to that.

Now she is preparing for an increasingly busy 2015 that will see her juggle her track commitments with a return to the road – among others a trip to the North West as she bids to claim an historic third win at the Great Manchester Run in May.

But Pavey says she won’t stop there after setting her sights on competing at a fifth Olympic Games.

“I’ll definitely continue to be a runner forever, I’ll never stop running,” she said. “At the start of 2014 I definitely had in my mind that it would be my final year.

“I think I was just really pleased (with her 2014 results) to see that I could still be competitive. I didn’t know whether that would be possible.

“So that gave me hope that I could continue. Then I started to have thoughts about whether I could get in the Olympic team for 2016 and I’m targeting trying to do that.

“But I’m not complacent about it, because you can’t just want to do an Olympics, you’ve got to qualify and there’s a lot of good young girls coming through and obviously I’m getting older and older.

“I’m not saying I could easily get on the team, it’s just something I would aim to try and do and it just makes it feel that it might be a possibility.”

© Sportsbeat 2015