SOMETIMES an athlete's greatest rival is his or her own body. Although the mind and heart are desperate to compete, the body can be too damaged or fragile to permit the athlete to perform at the most basic level.
It is a frustration that champion long jumper and professional physiotherapist Bronwyn Thompson has faced many times.
"It is difficult as an athlete to be a physio as well. I often have an internal conflict because the athlete in me will say 'no, you've got to keep running' whereas the physio will say 'oh no, I think maybe you should stop'."
And now, just a week before the Beijing Olympics, Thompson is again trying to bring her injured body up to her own expectations. Within the next fortnight Thompson needs to prove to Athletics Australia that she has recovered from all injuries before she is allowed to represent Australia in an event for which she has already qualified.
"I am doing a fair bit of sports psychology to try and get my brain in the frame of mind of still being able to compete even if I'm not doing as much training" she told The Age . "Visualising healing is one of the strategies I'm using to help improve the healing. I imagine the swelling leaving, the bones growing stronger and the muscles growing stronger."
Thompson will set up two informal events with Athletics Australia to prove she is performance-ready.
More specifically, she has to jump a minimum of 6.60 metres in front of an official, or she will not be walking onto the field at the Bird's Nest stadium on August 19.
"The reality is that if I'm not jumping 6.60, then I'm not going to be very happy with what I'll be jumping in the Olympics anyway and there wouldn't be much point in me going. So I'm trying not to think too much about that possibility, but sometimes it does pop into my head."
Thompson, 30, is a Queensland-based athlete and paediatric physiotherapist who represented Australia at both the Sydney and Athens Olympics. She placed 15th in Sydney, but reached fourth place in Athens.
However, she is no stranger to juggling health problems with major competitions. She had a benign tumour removed from her take-off foot just after the 2000 games, and was recovering from major knee surgery in 2004.
Thompson won the national long jump title five times and won a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in 2006.
After recovering from a knee reconstruction in late 2007, Thompson hurt an ankle and then lower back while training in June earlier this year. These injuries prevented her from travelling to Europe for summer competitions.
"The ankle is not too bad; it has improved quite well. My knee, touch wood, has been really quite good for most of the year, so I'm not really thinking about my knee," she said.
"It's stuff coming down from my back, that I had my epidural for, it's still improving and as a result I haven't been able to run as fast as I want to. And if I can't run as fast as I want to, then I tend not to jump as well as I want to."
Thompson's longest recorded jump is 7.0 metres, which she reached in 2002, but she has not jumped over 6.9 metres since 2006.
If she does make it to the Olympics, Thompson's main competitor will be Russia's Tatyana Lebedeva, who won gold in Athens with a 7.07-metre jump. The world record for women's long-jump is 7.52 metres, set in 1988 by Russian athlete Galina Chistyakova.