Hannah Miley was not looking to read too much into it, but victory over the woman who denied her a third successive Commonwealth Games 400 metres individual medley gold medal the last time they met competitively did not do any harm in the process of testing her physical and mental strength at this stage of a challenging season.

A punishing night’s work brought her a win in that re-match with England’s Aimee Wilmott, a second placed finish behind Tain Bruce in the 200m metres butterfly and fourth place in the 200 metres freestyle, which was won by Bruce’s Edinburgh University team-mate Kathryn Greenslade.

“Today was just about seeing how tough I was in my head,” said Miley.

“It’s about practising the mental toughness knowing no-one else is doing three events so suck it up and get on with it. Time wise I’m not looking at the scoreboard and trying to get fast times, I’m just trying to race and see what I can get through.”

At 28 the Aberdeen-based swimmer is now bordering on veteran status in the swimming world, but she still revels in the extraordinary work-loads she takes upon herself and reckons the rivalry with Willmott is working in her favour in the longer term, in spite of that Gold Coast disappointment.

“Having that pressure of having someone there that you know can really kick your butt really drives and spurs you on,” she said with a laugh.

“She trains in Stirling, I train in Aberdeen, so it’s not like training all the time together and when it comes to meets like this we don’t know how fresh one another are and it’s on the day who can touch the wall first.

“I’m 28 and Aimee’s 25 which is really good because a lot of people think 400 metres medley should just be for juniors because it gets harder when you get older. Yeah, it gets tough, but it takes a special person to have mentally stick with it and race against and having people like Aimee to race against really keeps the sport alive, which is quite nice.”

For Willmott it had been something of a case of if you can’t beat them, join them… and then beat them, when she claimed that Commonwealth Games win, showing the benefits of what had been an enforced change of base from London, after funding for the elite programme was cut there, to Stirling University, where the work she did with some of Scotland’s finest helped her edge her rival out by just over a quarter of a second.

Last night’s times were telling, though, Miley pulling clear on the freestyle leg to finish in 4 minutes 40.28, more than a second clear of second-placed Willmott (4.41.84), but close to six seconds down on those they registered on the Gold Coast as both returned to competitive mode.

“This is quite a good meet for me in terms of getting back in the swing of things,” said Willmott.

“I’ve only been back in the pool for four weeks since the Commonwealth Games, so it was nice to have a bit of a break, then chill out, then get back in. This is the first meet since, so it was always going to be tough, but it wasn’t too bad to be fair.

“It’s always hard swimming 400 IMs mid-season. Obviously as you get older anything mid-season’s fairly hard, so there were lots of different things I was working on there and just trying to execute some good technical points. I’ll obviously go back now and have a look and see if I did the job.”

This event was ideally timed to provide another taste of competing in the Tollcross pool where she will this time be a teammate of Miley’s when the European Championships are staged there in August, albeit she found it a far from hostile environment when she was part of the England team competing against Scotland at Glasgow 2014.

“For me Glasgow 2014 was amazing with the crowds, even though I was an English swimmer,” she said.

“It’s only just over the border so a lot of my family and friends came to watch. It’s a really nice place to come and compete and I think it’ll be another exciting meet in August.”