LAURA Muir has been keeping a scrapbook charting her adventures in the world of athletics.

Come the end of this week, she may need a whole new volume with the 21-year-old Glasgow University veterinary student set to begin her Commonwealth Games campaign in the 1500m at Hampden tomorrow.

"I've kept a scrapbook since my early teens of all my newspaper clippings," she says. "They have gradually got bigger. It used to be just one line: place and name. Then it got to be a sentence, then a paragraph and a photo.

"I've kept everything so I have quite a few books full now. I keep all my race numbers and event passes too. I think it would be quite sad to get to the end of your career and not have anything to show people and look back on."

That, however, is unlikely to be a fate to befall Muir. She has enjoyed a stellar year seeing her top the world rankings and send a flurry of indoor and outdoor records tumbling. Muir, one of the Sunday Herald's Six to Follow to Glasgow 2014, has been selected to represent Team Scotland in the 800m and 1500m.

With the action in the longer distance up first, her blistering form in recent weeks would appear to bode well. Muir obliterated Yvonne Murray's 1987 Scottish record with a time of 4:00.07 in the 1500m in the Diamond League in Paris this month.

"It's crazy to see how far I've come and nice to be performing well," she says. "It's very surreal but I'm really enjoying it and it's great to be up there with girls that are running so fast."

While Muir can't quite remember where she was the November day in 2007 when it was announced that Glasgow would host the Games, her coach Andy Young certainly can. "I was in the Kelvin Hall with a thousand school kids," he recalls, laughing.

Young, sitting next to his prodigious talent, shakes his head when asked if he imagined back then that he would have an athlete of Muir's calibre running at the Games. "No, I've got to admit I didn't," he says. "The other day I was trying to explain to Laura just how fast four minutes is. The pair of them, the two Lauras [Muir and English rival Weightman] were saying: 'Oh, we were so close to 4:00' [in the Paris Diamond League]. They had both just dropped two or three seconds off their PBs. It's super quick. People who run this fast don't come along every day."

Muir is sharing a room in the Athletes' Village with 400m hurdler Eilidh Child, who hails from the same small corner of Kinross-shire. The pair first roomed together at the European Indoor Championships in Gothenburg last year and have since forged a firm friendship.

"We text each other a lot and it's nice to have someone who has been through it with you and comes from the same background that you can relate to them," says Muir. "She's a really good friend and great support."

In recent months, Muir has experienced increasingly levels of attention, and Child, who is very much the poster girl of Glasgow 2014, has helped her keep it all in perspective.

"Eilidh has dealt with it well and I think we both have this attitude now where we see the pressure as a good thing," says Muir. "It's not something to be perceived as bad, rather the fact that people recognise you are doing well and are there to support you."

With fellow Scot Lynsey Sharp also named for the 800m it could tee up a clash reminiscent of the famous tussles between Murray and her old rival Liz McColgan. However, after an extra round was added to the 800m to accommodate a high number of entrants, Muir and Young plan to hold fire on making a firm decision as to whether she will compete until the eve of the race on Tuesday.

"The 1500m is the focus," confirms Young. "It's almost an easy one because it works with the main event being first. We don't have to worry about [the 800m] until after. It depends how the 1500m goes. If it's a tactical affair and it just comes down to the last lap, that will affect how much it takes out of the legs, as opposed to someone taking the heats out in four minutes, which I don't think they would. There's not many capable of it."

Muir nods in agreement. "The 800m is going to be a positive either way," she says. "If I don't perform quite as I would like in the 1500m, then I still have that 800m chance. If I do perform well in the 1500m there is no pressure for the 800m. With the 1500m being so unpredictable it's good to have that there."