Sabine Zimmer competing in the 49th edition of the Coppa Sesto San Giovanni (© Tim Watt)
It’s past midnight on the train taking walkers to Moscow from the IAAF Race Walking Challenge final last September.
The party in one carriage looks set to roll on until daybreak thanks mainly to copious bottles of vodka handed over as parting gifts.
But Sabine Zimmer isn’t so sure.
The German walker makes noises to call it a night, and Luke Adams protests for her to stay.
“You don’t HAVE to go,” pleads the Australian international picking on her reason to break up the group.
But Zimmer, whose endeavours to get to Saransk have just netted her $15,000 dollars, stops to think.
“I have to go in order to sleep a little – and I WANT to go,” making the point as final as a full stop.
The moment underlined Zimmer’s determination not just to avoid bleary eyes and a fuzzy tongue, but her steadfast path to get to Saransk in the first place.
The German policewoman's focus has steadily moved her up the top-ten of women walkers since she burst on the scene to win gold at Annecy in the IAAF World Junior Championships nearly 10 years ago.
But of all the journeys since, none can have been as taxing as the one needed to get her from home in Bochum, near Dusseldorf, to the Mordovian capital around 600k east of Moscow.
Just days before, she made the two-hour train journey from Bochum to the Russian embassy in Bonn with her official invite in order to obtain a visa, only to be told she needed a valid airline ticket as well.
Instantly, she called her walker friends Kjersti and Stefan Platzer in Norway, asking if they could buy her a ticket online and fax it to her at an internet café near the embassy.
With seconds to spare she raced back to the embassy with the precious fax, only to have the door closed in front of her and be told visa transactions were over for the day and she should come back tomorrow.
This she did, making eight hours of train journeys before she even set off for Saransk.
But after finishing third in the overall series, the 27-year-old’s prospective trip to a top 10 finish in the Olympics was met with another obstacle last week – and this time it had nothing to do with bureaucracy.
“Did you see that new time from Kaniskina?” said Zimmer from her training base at Flagstaff, Arizona.
The German is referring to the scintillating 1:25:11 from World Champion Olga Kaniskina at the Russian Winter Championsips in Adler on 23 February.
“She looks so slight, and so young, and yet it’s going to take something to catch her.”
But Zimmer’s pragmatic approach to the next hurdle will see her toe the line for the first time in 2008 at the second Challenge race in Rio Maior, Portugal, on 5 April. And she’s grateful for a clean bill of health throughout her 160k-a-week winter training schedule that’s prepared her for the coming season.
Zimmer’s ready to have a go for another third place in the series, but thinks this year is going to be much harder – and not just because of Kaniskina and visas.
She said: “It’s Olympic year as well as the World Walking Cup in May, so there are going to be more athletes out there.
“And the thing with the Olympics is that everyone is just that bit more motivated.
“But you can get someone coming forward from nowhere,” says the woman whose position at the foot of the podium mirrors a certain Athanasia Tsoumeleka four years ago.
And who had heard of the Greek walker until she broke the tape to win the biggest athletics prize of them all?
Paul Warburton for the IAAF