IF someone had scripted the perfect year for Laura Muir, it perhaps wouldn't be too far off how 2013 has unfolded.

A raft of impressive performances over 800m and 1500m have seen her catch the eye of British athletics selectors, claiming a bronze medal in the latter distance at the European Athletics Under-23 Championships in Tampere, Finland, last month.

Muir won the 1500m title at the UK Indoor Championships in February and reached the final at the 2013 European Indoor Championships in Gothenburg the following month. Since the 2014 Commonwealth Games selection period opened in April, she has gained the qualifying standard for both the 800m and 1500m.

Most recently Muir showed her mettle in a 1500m world-class field at the Sainsbury's Anniversary Games in front of a sell out 65,000-strong crowd at the Olympic Stadium in London. In the coming days, she is due to fly to Moscow to represent Britain over 800m and make her World Championships debut at senior level.

Yet it is not merely the athletics world that the 20-year-old has taken by surprise with her meteoric rise. By her own admission she herself came into this year with far less lofty ambitions.

"My main goal was to get on the team for the European Athletics Under-23 Championships," she says.

But for Muir, who took up running at the age of 11 when she joined Dunfermline and West Fife Athletics Club near her hometown of Milnathort, Kinross-shire, it almost didn't happen. By her late teens her progress, she says, had started to level off.

It wasn't until she arrived at Glasgow University in 2011 to study veterinary medicine that her athletics career truly began to flower. It was Glasgow University Athletics Club coach Andy Young, himself a former World Schools 800m champion, who spotted her potential. Young believed that what Muir had previously seen as merely a hobby she loved, could be cultivated into something greater.

He was soon proved right. Within months of being taken under his wing, Muir made her British Under-20 debut in the 2011 European Cross-Country Championships. In February last year, she claimed the Scottish Under-20 Cross-Country title at Falkirk, winning the national indoor 800m title the following day and breaking the Scottish Under-20 record held by Linsey Macdonald since 1982. Muir capped it off with selection for the 3000m at the World Junior Championships in Barcelona last summer.

"When I went to university everything changed," she says. "Before I'd been mainly training by myself and was in this little bubble where I rarely raced anywhere outside Scotland. My main goal and focus was on the Scottish Championships. Events like the World Junior Championships and European Athletics Under-23 Championships simply weren't on my radar.

"Being coached by Andy opened my eyes to all of that and gave me a bit more of a platform to look towards Glasgow 2014. I had levelled off at under-17 and under-20 level, but once I went to university I started to train harder, changed a lot of things and it all started to click. Andy would say: 'You can run this time' and I'd think: 'No way'. Then I not only would do that, but surpass it. No one, not least myself, thought I would be where I am now. It has been a complete surprise."

Muir is momentarily stumped when asked what it was Young recognised in her. "I don't know really," she says. "He has never told me directly but I've heard he has told other people that he knew straightaway I had something special.

"I guess I'm gutsy, I keep on going and fight the whole way. I enjoy my athletics too. I think you need to have that to give something 100%. I love to run and I think Andy saw that."

Testament to that tenacity was when she was jostled going into the final lap of her 1500m final in Tampere and almost took a tumble while trying to hold position. "It definitely got a bit hairy," she laughs. "But I thought: 'I didn't work this hard for two years to come away without a medal'. I gave it absolutely everything."

Competing at Sainsbury's Anniversary Games in London brought valuable experience in dealing with tens of thousands around a packed stadium cheering her name.

"That was amazing," she said. "To hear that home crowd roar as I was running was something I'd never experienced before - I loved every second of that race. It was great preparation for next year when I'll be running in front of a Scottish crowd at Hampden."

Funded by Scottish Athletics and Winning Students, Scotland's high performance sports scholarship programme, the runner has another key sponsor in Muir Homes, owned by her great uncle John, with travel expenses reimbursed through British Athletics UKA Futures Programme.

This allows her to balance training with her university studies and she is aided by an ability to cram a superhuman amount into each day. Most recently she has been doing a work placement with dressage horses near her family home in Milnathort, focusing on the handling side of veterinary work while helping out everything from grooming to tacking up and mucking out stables.

Retaining the air of a young woman still pinching herself at an unexpectedly fortuitous turn of events, she recounts her delight when her GB kit arrived. "It was pretty exciting," she says. "It felt like Christmas with this huge box full of stuff. I laid it all out on the bed to look at it properly."

But behind her sunny demeanour lies a steely determination, her sights set firmly on the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. "To make the Commonwealth Games was always a childhood dream but I don't know that I ever believed it would realistically happen for me," she says. "Whenever someone asked me the question, I would tell them that was the goal but I never really saw how I would get there. I would always think: 'How on earth am I going to do that?'

"When I started working with Andy things became more structured, he gave me clear cut times to aim for and set achievable goals. I could finally see how I could get to the level I needed. Before my PB for 1500m was 4mins 38secs and I got it down to 4.14 within a year."

To that end she has further improved, gaining the required Glasgow 2014 qualification time of 4.10.50 over 1500m on no fewer than four occasions, including posting a blistering PB of 4.07.76 at the Sainsbury's Grand Prix in Birmingham in June.

While before she was cautiously optimistic, Muir is now brimming with self belief. She ran a World Championship qualifying time of 2.00.86 - and another PB - in the 800m Memorial Leon Buyle, Belgium, in July securing her selection for Moscow.

"I put quite a lot of pressure on myself for the Europeans [Under 23s] because I wanted to get a medal, so it will be nice to be a bit more relaxed and I think I might perform a little bit better if I feel the pressure is off," she says. "It's going to be an amazing experience in Moscow and I'll give it my best shot. I'm looking forward to seeing what the competition is like at that level. I can't wait."