The first Australian home in the 2016 Rio marathon and the 18th overall, the Tasmanian has spent the past 12 months on the sidelines nursing stress reactions in her right foot.

Much of that time was spent in Sydney, where she has been based for the majority of her career, but the past two months have seen the 29-year-old relocate to her home town of Launceston.

As Clark puts it, you can take the girl out of Tassie but you can’t take Tassie out of the girl.

“I wanted to move home,” she said.

“I missed home and all my family’s here so it’s good to have them around and to be able to see them more often rather than living in the hustle and bustle of Sydney.

“It’s good to run here and it’s just such a lovely place.

“Everything’s just so easy - there’s no traffic, there’s no pollution, there’s no 4.30am starts to get all your training in before you go to work, it’s just really easy and everyone’s super friendly.

“Launny’s got that close-knit feel about it and I just really miss that in Sydney.”

Clark’s last major race was the 2017 world championship marathon in London, where she finished 24^th despite not racing as well as she’d hoped. 

She competed twice later in the year – winning the 3000m at the Treloar Shield in Sydney and placing third at the Burnie Ten – but has not been sighted on land since as injuries kept her to running laps of the pool.

Clark’s troublesome foot flared up on multiple occasions due to her eagerness to return to training, but the former Youngtown Little Athletics Club runner is confident she can finally see light at the end of the tunnel.

Walking with her on the path to recovery has been friend and fellow Launceston marathon runner Josh Harris.

The pair have shared an almost identical narrative in the past 12 months, with Harris finally on the comeback from a serious injury to his right foot which has seen him out of action since the 2017 world championships.

“It makes a huge difference just to compare notes like - ‘how did you feel your first run back?’ ‘Oh it was so bad’. ‘Oh yeah it was, it was so awful’ - it’s good to just have someone who’s going through an almost identical experience,” Clark said.

“I didn’t have the surgery he did but we’ve both been out for the better part of a year.

“It just takes that pressure off as well - you don’t feel an inner rush to get back when you see someone else going through similar kind of motions and not being able to run every day.

“To have both come off world champs, from the highest of highs and now we’re at a pretty low low, it does make it a bit easier.”

Clark still holds high hopes of becoming a two-time Olympian come July 2020, and plans to be back competing by the start of next year.  

“I’d like to think (Tokyo is a possibility), I still live in hope.

“I’ve got the rest of this year to get myself to a good spot running wise and then next year give it a good crack.

“(Training) has been a real battle because I hate cross-training - I only love running - but I’ve been on the bike a lot and I’ve been on the elliptical a fair bit.

“I don’t think it’s quite the same as running, but I’d like to think it has kept some level of fitness.

“You get muscle memory in there so I’d like to think I’m not starting from scratch.

“It definitely will be tough but if not this (Olympics) then the next one, I’m still relatively young.”