Keely Hodgkinson 2.0 is fuelled by Hell Hill, an Oura ring and Kim Kardashian

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Keely Hodgkinson broke the 800m indoor record last month (pictured) and is gunning for an outdoor mark, long-considered unbeatable, that has stood since 1984 - Sameer Al-Doumy/Getty Images

Given how much she has conquered in her relatively young career, it is scarcely believable that Keely Hodgkinson is still searching for her first global title outside the Olympics. But that could change when the golden girl of British athletics lines up in Sunday’s 800 metres final at the World Indoor Championships in Poland.

After a 2025 disrupted by injury, Hodgkinson has spent the winter reinventing herself in the build-up to the first major in the athletics calendar. Last month she shattered the world indoor record in Lievin, shaving almost a second off the previous mark by clocking 1min 54.87sec. Curiously, as she posed on a replica throne with a tiara placed on her head, those in Hodgkinson’s inner circle were already tempering their elation.

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“This sounds completely crazy, but that was the bare minimum of what we expected,” Jenny Meadows, Hodgkinson’s co-coach, tells Telegraph Sport. “Keely’s in a lot faster shape than that. We definitely think she could have gone half a second or a whole second faster. That makes me think, at the World Indoors, can she put her foot down and better that world record?”

Welcome to the world of “Keely 2.0”. This is a stronger, more robust Hodgkinson who is determined to make 2026 her comeback year as she renews her long-standing aim of breaking Jarmila Kratochvilova’s 42-year-old outdoor world record of 1-53.28.

After setting a new British record in February – and backing up with a new personal best over 400m last month in Glasgow – Hodgkinson’s recent results point to a woman working hard to start afresh. In the latest vlog on her YouTube channel, where she gives fans a behind-the-scenes look of “the sweat, the style and the sweet moments” of her life, Hodgkinson avidly talks about 2026 being the Chinese year of the horse. “We’ve just come off the year of the snake,” she says. “My 2025 was definitely a year of the snake, which was about the shedding of bad things. We’re coming into this new energy, this new era of life, which is exactly how I feel. They say in the year of the horse, you are rewarded with courage.”

Big on crystals and spirituality, she continues to embody the same girl-next-door personality which the nation fell in love with when she stormed to gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Last February, she returned to the French capital to help launch a collaboration between Kim Kardashian’s shapewear brand, Skims, and Nike at a glamorous, red-carpet event. The self-confessed fashionista is meticulous about how many training days she sacrifices for such high-brow appearances, in part because there has been a notable shift in approach at her M11 Track Club in Manchester.

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Team additions to make ‘the difference’

After supporting Hodgkinson through recurring hamstring injuries last season, Hodgkinson’s coaches at the 24-athlete group led by Meadows and Trevor Painter accepted they needed to branch out from their trusty methodology of stopwatches, splits and spreadsheets. “We knew we needed extra resources,” Meadows says. “We’ve won an Olympic title, Keely has run the sixth fastest 800m time ever, but the difference that it’s going to take to get all the way down to 1-53.27 or beyond has got to be part of a wider plan.”

Meadows and Painter asked Nike, a sponsor of both M11 and Hodgkinson, to fund a part-time assistant coach in Darren Borthwick and Hannah Martin, a trackside physiotherapist. The sportswear giant willingly obliged.

The noteworthy addition of Rachel McCormick, a respected physiologist who formerly worked at the Australian Institute of Sport, to the M11 team, followed last autumn. A former 1500m specialist, McCormick is in the process of building a forensic picture of Hodgkinson’s capabilities by monitoring a number of key variables that influence her performance, from heart rate variability, red blood cell volume, lactate levels and menstrual cycle symptoms.

“It’s not that we want to change our philosophy, but Trevor and I are at a stage in our lives and careers where we can explain to people how we get our athletes running well, but we also want to leave a legacy behind,” Meadows explains. “A lot of our coaching is visual – we know how an athlete moves – but it’s not really backed up by any sports science. It’s all our knowledge. We have years upon years of data and will know Keely’s benchmark and if she’s ahead of where she was this time last year. But we wanted a physiologist who collects some data for us, which we can hopefully pass on and say, ‘This is what it took to run 1-53.27 – the 800m world record’, and it’s not just us explaining qualitatively what we do, we have a real quantitative bank to give to people.”

In a sign of the high regard in which M11 is held, Painter and Meadows sifted through almost 200 applicants for the physiologist role, before settling on McCormick. Intriguingly, her role is being paid for by Maurten, the sports nutrition company which supported Eliud Kipchoge in his successful 2022 marathon world record attempt in Chicago. In a similar vein, Hodgkinson has also expressed a desire to be a history maker and complete “Project 1:53”, the goal she set after storming to gold at the 2024 Olympics in Paris. “I feel like I’ve been totally spoilt because Keely already has the world indoor record – everything I could have asked for as a physiologist,” McCormick says.

‘Training like I’d never seen before’

Last November, Hodgkinson flew to Potchefstroom, an elite training facility in South Africa, for a gruelling two-month training camp. It was her first full winter training block in three years. In footage from her YouTube series, Hodgkinson can be seen crawling along a grass area after pushing herself to the point of exhaustion during a round of tempo runs. Other scenes show her holding her own alongside male runners pounding the notoriously named “Hell Hill” in the South African countryside, with bike rides as active recovery sessions.

“Keely can do the speed and the power work with the boys on the hill and she goes with them,” Meadows says. “Keely’s in group two – the second wave of younger athletes – on the tempo runs, but then on the hills we put her with the boys because she’s so advanced. She is really fortunate that she has Georgia [Hunter Bell] to run with on the track sessions, international standard boys on the hills and then younger athletes who are developing in the tempo work, as that’s not really her forte. So she has a good mix of everything.”

Hodgkinson trains with Olympic bronze medalist and fellow Team GB athlete Georgia Hunter Bell - Alessandro Levati/Getty Images

Having just started in her role, McCormick joined the team in South Africa in an observational capacity and was blown away by the group’s unconventional, intense programme. “In most groups I’ve worked with in the past, if the athlete does a hard workout one day, they’ll always have an easy day the next day,” McCormick says. “This was something I’d never seen before. I do think M11 is truly a very unique group in that sense. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen something like this and I’ve been in middle-distance running my entire life. This group also does a lot of cross-training [non-running activities] – there are groups dispersed around the world who use cross-training but probably not to the same extent that M11 do.”

The game-changing £350 ring

On the day we spoke, McCormick gave Hodgkinson a techy piece of jewellery. Made by the Finnish health-tech company Oura, the £350 titanium smart ring, which the Football Association bought in bulk for the England men’s team for their Euro 2024 campaign and is worn by the likes of Prince Harry, tracks several biometrics, from sleep patterns to heart rate variability (HRV). The latter are minute variations in time between heartbeats which illustrates how an athlete responds to aerobic stress.

Former England head coach Gareth Southgate was seen wearing an Oura ring during Euro 2024 - Adam Davy/PA

“If you’re experiencing live stress and you’re trying to train on top of that, HRV captures the whole picture,” McCormick says. “It’s also very good at capturing illness, and when your body is fighting something before you even know you’re fighting something.” For Hodgkinson, who revealed she had been dealing with a stomach bug after securing bronze at last year’s World Championships – an achievement which Meadows still calls a “miracle” in her injury-hit season – it could be a game-changer.

Another piece of the puzzle centres around lactate: the level of lactic acid present in the blood which, when measured, indicates an athlete’s fitness level and allows training sessions to be tailored. “In the past lactate has had a really bad rep for being the cause of deterioration; everyone talks about lactic acid but people are starting to realise that lactate can actually be used as fuel,” McCormick explains.

“A lactate reading can help make sure that the stimulus of the session is exactly what the coach was hoping for. If the coach wants the athlete to run a little bit easier and their lactate level is very high, it’s a sign that they’re probably overworking. So you can dial them back, and that goes both ways. In events like the 400m and 800m where athletes need to rely very heavily on the anaerobic energy system – so without oxygen – you want their lactate numbers to be able to get pretty high pretty quickly because that indicates they can turn that system on straight away – but they also need to be able to tolerate it.”

Hodgkinson has made an effort to learn more about her physiology in an attempt to take her performances to the next level - Michael Steele/Getty Images

Plans are already in place to improve Hodgkinson’s understanding of the menstrual cycle’s effect on performance, with the group having sought advice from Prof Kirsty Elliot-Sale, a well-respected academic who has assisted multiple elite sportswomen in this space. Jessica Ennis-Hill is one of many former British athletes who wished she had been empowered with proper menstrual cycle education during her career, but this is now becoming the norm.

To prolong the effects of their South Africa training camp, Hodgkinson began incorporating biweekly training sessions in an environmental heat chamber after returning to Manchester. “The idea was to get some active exposure to maintain those adaptations they’ve developed in Potchefstroom a little longer,” McCormick says. “There’s a lot of research to suggest environment chambers are a good way of doing that… especially when you’re in Manchester and it’s raining every single day!”

With a world-class team around her, Hodgkinson has never been in a better place to remain injury-free and make up for lost time in 2026. For Meadows, it is the least she deserves: “When you’re working with someone who could be the greatest ever, you want to provide them with everything you’ve got.”

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