Vanessa Grimm will spend the coming weekend training and looking at Leverkusen.

The German indoor championships in the pentathlon and heptathlon are held there.

The 24-year-old from Frankfurt, who was the defending champion after her victory in 2020 and the cancellation of the event last year due to corona, this time, like many other top athletes, will not start a multi-competition under the roof.

“Summer comes very early,” says the Königsteiner LV athlete.

The first opportunity to qualify for the international tasks will be in Ratingen at the beginning of May. In addition, the outdoor season has two major international events in store: the World Championships in mid-July in Eugene/Oregon and the European Championships at home a month later in Munich. Grimm has his sights set on both events, even if the time in between seems short for the all-rounders who are under a lot of pressure in the competition. For this she wants to break the World Cup standard of 6420 points.

With a view to her best performance of 6316 points, which the then debutant achieved in 2021 in the all-around Mecca Götzis, a further increase is required.

But Grimm is confident: since the native of North Hesse started regular training with regional association coach Philipp Schlesinger in 2015, after moving from her home town of Hofgeismar to the Rhine-Main area, things have been steadily improving.

The track and field athlete cites a similar attitude on both sides, her freedom from injury and the involvement of experts for the individual disciplines as reasons.

Their performance improvement also boosted their motivation.

More than the certificate of participation

On August 5, Grimm stood in Tokyo's Olympic Stadium and looked around. Shortly before, the U-23 European Championship participant from 2019 had finished her first big heptathlon among the active athletes in 19th place with 6114 points. A dream had come true that she had written in her profile when she was still in elementary school. But in the future, she decided, she no longer just wanted to be there, but to be further ahead when comparing the versatile.

The luck of the fit and a stable nerve costume had helped her to the surprising Olympic premiere.

She already had this “in the back of her mind” before the season.

But only when she caught a tailor-made competition in Götzis and, as fifth with best performances in five individual disciplines, had significantly increased her previous record of 6047 from 2020, did the ticket to Japan seem realistic.

Another stable performance in Ratingen with fourth place and 6231 points with repeated best performances was followed by a nail-biter that lasted for weeks.

Only when it was clear at the end of the qualifying period that no one would push Germany out of the top 24 in the world rankings was Grimm able to pack his bags for Asia with relief. The policewoman, who works ten hours a week in an investigation group in the Bockenheim district as a member of the sports promotion group, would like to avoid such a test of patience in the future. After two indoor starts at the beginning of the year in Kalbach, where she secured the Hessian title in the shot put with 14.74 meters, Grimm withdrew to training again.

Little has changed with her successes in 2021, which, thanks to her three competitions with more than 6000 points each, also brought her third place overall in the World Athletics Challenge and an associated bonus of $15,000.

"I still have to get my spikes myself," says the perspective squad athlete of the German Athletics Association.

She cannot imagine that the youngsters could look up to her like she used to do with the top athletes.

"I'm still Vanessa," she says.