Catherina McKiernan is to go to altitude for the final phase of her preparations for the London Marathon, her first big objective of the New Year.

Following the example of Sonia O'Sullivan, she believes that it can help her to compensate for her relative lack of road-racing experience when she meets Liz McColgan and Joyce Chepchumba on the streets of London.

Unlike O'Sullivan, however, McKiernan is no stranger to altitude training. In fact, this will be the fifth occasion that she has prepared in this fashion and the likelihood is that she will return to New Mexico, for the third successive year.

She plans to go there immediately after running a half marathon in Lisbon on March 15th, an important race in helping to assess the level of her fitness, some five weeks ahead of the big London race.

In keeping with her programme last year, she will interrupt her altitude training to run a 10,000 metres road race at the start of April. Twelve months ago, the wisdom of that decision was illustrated by an impressive win at Fort Worth, but now the venue is likely to switch to New Orleans.

After another fluent performance at Dunleer last Sunday, when she was watched by one of the biggest cross country crowds in years, the Cavan athlete is coming under increasing pressure to amend her programme to take in the World Cross Country Championship in Marrakesh on March 22nd.

That would mean deleting the Lisbon half marathon from her schedule, however, and at this stage, there is no indication that she is prepared to do so. There is, however, a possibility that she may have a race before Lisbon, although there is no indication, as yet, where she will run.

Reflecting on Dunleer, she said: "I think the most memorable part of the day for me was the size of the crowd. World championships have been in front of fewer spectators and the atmosphere rubbed off on the athletes.

"From my point of view, it was a good race to win. But it's futile to speculate on what may happen if I go to the world championships - it's just not on this year."

O'Sullivan, meanwhile, ended her spell at altitude in northern Australia last Thursday and is now back in Melbourne. For her, it was a novel experience and at this point, she believes it was fully justified.

"I did a lot of running during the last four weeks and while it remains to be seen how that translates into performances, I am quite happy at at this stage," she said.

"I felt I needed to change my routine this year to bring back some of my old enthusiasm. That has been achieved and now it's a matter of making it work for me in competition."

O'Sullivan's programme for the year starts with a six-kilometres cross country race at Canberra next Sunday. After that, she will run two 5,000 metres track races at Sydney and Melbourne in the last week in February.