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Receiving confirmation of her spot at the Paris Olympic Games was a mixture of "relief and happiness" for Australian sprinter Liz Clay.
Even though Clay narrowly missed out on the qualification standard of 12.77, she was still one of the top 40 athletes in the world based on her performances.
In truth though, just getting into a position to qualify at all is some achievement for the Gold Coast-based 29-year-old.
"2022 was probably, I'd say I had one of the worst weeks of my life," Clay told ABC Gold Coast.
That's a big statement, but the experiences that awaited Clay over the next two years hold up to such a bold claim.
After running a personal best of 12.71 in the semifinals of the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, missing out on a spot in the final by just 0.04 seconds, Clay was at the peak of her powers.
That was, at the time, the second-fastest ever by an Australian woman.
Clay justifiably headed to the 2022 World Championships full of confidence, until the seventh hurdle of her first-round heat in Eugene, Oregon.
"I fell down around half-way in my heats," Clay recalled.
"I walked off the track and realised that I'd done a terrible injury to my foot."
The wash up was four dislocated fractures to bones in her foot, ruling Clay out of the Birmingham Commonwealth Games and condemning her to a gruelling period of recovery during which time she had to not only learn how to hurdle again, but simply walk.
"It was one of those things where I sat down with my surgeon and he gave me the timeline and I was like, 'you know what, that's not so bad'," Clay said.
"It was six weeks here, six weeks there, and then you're out of the boot and you're walking at about 10 weeks. And I was like, 'I can deal with that'.
"But then, when it actually happens, everything gets dragged out a bit.
"It ended up being a 12-month rehab to get back to some kind of form and then another 12 months to get back to career best form.
"It's really been a long, two year wait since that injury to get back to my best."
ABC Sport will be live blogging every day of the Paris Olympics from July 27
Rehabilitation is never a straightforward as flat sprint from gun to tape. The journey is far more analogous to Clay's own speciality, with hurdles blocking the most obvious path towards fitness.
Setbacks can cruel even the most rigorously tested processes, every one a bitter blow that has the potential to sap the strength of even the most optimistic.
"You've got a lot of pain, and walking doesn't mean you're walking around with a smile on your face, walking is limping 20 metres down the road to get a coffee and back.
"Everything just took longer than I expected. Running took longer than I expected.
"I had pain in my foot for six months afterwards, it just wasn't the sunshine and rainbows that I expected it to be."
Clay tried to remain positive, but such was the tumult of seeing her training partners compete during the 2023 Australian domestic season, while she painfully crept closer to full speed, was almost enough to bring her to despair.
"I think I'm a pretty tough person and I can deal with a lot," Clay said.
"But … about seven months after everything had happened … I was just so slow and so far behind all my teammates.
"It really crept up on me and I just had this week where I was like, 'this is so much harder than I expected, and am I ever going to get out of this funk?'
"I just felt like I was stuck in this limbo for a few months.
"Obviously you do have some of those dark times but there were so many challenging moments that were just so unexpected but that's what makes the success that I'm having now so much sweeter."
Clay said she leant on a number of people during her rehabilitation, notably her sports psychologist, who was only ever a phone call away.
But there was also the individual drive to improve on that semifinal performance in Tokyo.
"I knew that if I was to do [the rehab] well, I just had to go into this mentality that I am a professional athlete, I am an elite athlete, every single day that I wake up and I take another step forward on this journey, I have to do it like an Olympic finalist would do it," she said.
"What would they do in those difficult moments? What decision would they make?
"It was hard, but I kept checking myself and trying to put my best foot forward in every situation and just never switched off."
Another thing Clay was able to harness was a short conversation that she had back in 2014, after she had been named on her first Australian junior team as a 19-year-old.
Clay was a last-minute inclusion for the 2014 World Junior Athletics Championships — which coincidentally also took place at Hayward Field in Eugene.
Given her late nomination for the squad, Clay crammed some last-minute training to get herself up to speed.
It was a rookie error that had disastrous consequences.
That extra load resulted in a fracture to the navicular bone in her foot, ruling her out of the competition before she even had a chance to pull on her Australia kit.
"I walked back into the dining hall [at the pre-event training camp] after getting my scan, and I was in tears," Clay said.
"One of the team members pulled me aside and said, 'You have to stick this out. I see athletes all the time and I know that you have something within you that is really talented, and you have the passion, you have the energy and the drive and I really want you to stick it out because I believe in you and I think you're going to go really far'.
"I have genuinely held onto that conversation for the last decade.
"I still talk to that person after most meets, Sarah, she'll always message me saying, 'keep going girl' or 'I saw you, great race'.
"That conversation had a really big impact on me and I didn't know that it would at the time.
"Sometimes it's all you need. You just need one person to say, 'you have it, and you're going to be amazing, you just need to stick at it.'
"Sometimes that's hard to find in an individual sport … all you've got is yourself and your support system.
"So words can go a long way."
Such a long way that she has held on to them, a decade later, as she launches her second Olympic bid alongside Michelle Jenneke and Celeste Mucci.
A season's best 12.78 in Kuortane, Finland, last month gave Clay the confidence that she is back on track — even as she acknowledges that her spot on that particular Stade de France track is more competitive than ever.
"The goal this Olympics is to go one better and make the final," she said.
"Hurdling in Australia and around the world has just boomed — the calibre of the field, the quality of the athletes is almost three times as good as it was in Tokyo.
"I'm going to have to really step up and have the performance of my life in Paris to make the final, but I do believe it's possible."
As long as she keeps putting her best foot forward, anything is.
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