Enjoying the journey: How Emily leapt from high jump to hill running

Saturday 14th March 2026

Photo by Bobby Gavin

By Katy Barden

It appeared to be a simple case of mistaken identity. A quick data check, however, provided reassuring evidence that the young Law and District AAC high jumper was indeed Emily McNicol, now known best as a Senior international endurance athlete.

McNicol is a former multi-eventer – she competed as a pentathlete and heptathlete in her early years in the sport – but she has also competed in multiple events, ranging from short sprints to long hurdles, to middle distance and cross country, and most recently to the roads, hills and mountains.

‘Yeah, that’s me!’, confirms the 26-year-old, laughing at the random nature of her athletics profile.

‘My sister was really good at Combined Events when we were younger and I just wanted to do everything that she was doing.

‘I think it was the U12 SUPERteams that got us into it. Our club was really into that and it was so much fun. We’d have matching multi-coloured socks and matching flowers in our hair. After that, my mum just encouraged us to try everything.’

Photo by Bobby Gavin

It was a fantastic introduction to a sport that has given McNicol so much and continues to do so.

In the last 12 months she’s competed for Scotland at the Senior Home (hill running) International in the Lake District, her first Scottish senior vest; the Trofeo Vanoni Relays in Italy; the Home Countries Cross Country International in London; and, demonstrating her incredible range, over 3k at the 2026 Armagh Road Races.

But it hasn’t always been easy. McNicol admits that when she reached her mid-teens, like so many others at that age, she ‘hit a bit of a slump’ and didn’t know what she wanted to do next.

She’d competed in Combined Events throughout high school but all of a sudden, with the pressure of studying in addition to travelling from her home in Carluke to training in Grangemouth, it became too much.

‘My long-term coach Eddie (McQuillan) encouraged me to try a new event so I couldn’t compare myself to previous years,’ she says.

‘I guess it was quite hard having done heptathlon because I’d already covered seven events, so he was like, ‘Why don’t we try the 400m hurdles?’, so that’s what we did. I really enjoyed it and I got back into the sport that way.’

It was an ingenious move from coach McQuillan who has continued to support her through ‘interesting’ event choices and pivot when necessary to make the next best move:

‘At one point I decided to do a high jump competition and ended up training for the high jump and the 400m hurdles . . . you know, that classic combination,’ she laughs.

‘But we realised at a certain point that I’m not a sprinter. I guess my main limitation was my raw speed, so we knew I wasn’t going to progress much more in that event. Eddie then encouraged me to go towards distance; so from there we went to the 800m, 1500m, and now I’ve ended up with road, cross and hills!’

McNicol completed an undergraduate degree and integrated Master’s in biomedical engineering at the University of Strathclyde before starting a PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2022 looking at non-invasive spinal cord stimulation for the rehabilitation of spinal cord injuries.

Throughout that time, her coach has also been studying, putting in his own work behind the scenes.

‘He’s so encouraging and he’s really been instrumental in everything I’ve done,’ she says.

‘I guess he knew from the start that my strength was going to lie in distance, but as long as I’m happy, he’s happy. For every new event I’ve tried, he’s gone out and done research, spoken to coaches, gone on courses.

‘I genuinely think I’ve probably given him more research and studying to do than I’ve done myself in my nine years of university, but he just wants to learn as much as he can to give me the best possible chance of improving.’

McNicol has recently moved from Glasgow to Edinburgh. She remains a member of Law and District AAC, a club she joined when she was eight, but she is now a first-claim member of Carnethy Hill Running Club and is embracing the ‘great hill running scene and community’ in the capital.

She continues to run for the University of Glasgow too, the team she represented when finishing an impressive fifth in February’s Lindsays National XC (her highest ever placing in that event).

Joining Carnethy was a giveaway, but after years of reinvention and a Scottish vest at 26, she now sees her athletics future in the hills.

‘It was never really my goal (to represent Scotland), I just wanted to do things I enjoyed and I really, really enjoyed the hills – running for Scotland was just a happy outcome,’ she says.

‘A lot of my friends are hill runners and they’d been saying for a while, ‘Oh, you need to get into a hill race’. I’m easily convinced and I’ll sign up to anything that sounds fun. When I did, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I can see now why they’ve suggested this!’.

‘Hill running is still a whole new world to me. There are so many hill races that genuinely just look fun and there are so many exciting opportunities. I guess I just want to see where I end up. I know it’s different to where I started, but I think all those early events gave me a good, broad base. Now I’m just building on the skills that I learned.’

From high jumper to hill runner, McNicol has proved that anything really is possible (*if you enjoy it enough).

Afterall, variety is the spice of life.

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Tags: Emily McNicol, Features