COACH Todd Bennett will be looking to the heavens before deciding whether to let Emma Duck loose on the weekend's Hants AA Track & Field Championships at the Mountbatten Centre.

The Portsmouth track is notoriously damp and blustery in May - a far cry from Italy where 25-year-old Duck , below, last weekend posted a personal best 52.85s over the flat 400 metres, sneaking her into the top-50 of the UK all-time list.

It continues a promising start to the year for the Team Southampton athlete, who two months ago joined forces with training partners Melanie Purkiss and Helen Karagounis, plus Jenny Meadows, to break the British national 4x400m record at the IAAF World Indoor Championships in Moscow.

It was a fantastic achievement for Duck. Not only was it her international debut, but she is not even a specialist on the flat.

Her forte is the 400m hurdles and in last year's Hampshire Championships she served notice of her potential with a 57.06 run, which met the qualifying standard for the Commonwealths in Melbourne.

It was only her fifth competitive outing over the one-lap hurdles after switching from sprint hurdling.

Unfortunately for the Townhill Park girl, her Australia dream never materialised. Just a couple of weeks after the Hampshire Championships, she fell and banged her knee in the warm-up at the Inter-Counties, sidelining her for the rest of the season.

Bennett said: "All credit to Emma. She came back from the that injury and decided to do the indoor season, made the British team for Moscow and ended up breaking the British record. That's given her the confidence to believe in her own ability."

While Purkiss and Commonwealth duo Robert Tobin and Sian Scott are likely to wait until the Loughborough International on May 21 to start their season, Duck - who combines athletics with a full-time job at Southampton's Royal South Hants Hospital - was itching to get going earlier.

"Because we did the indoor season and the Commonwealths, most of the athletes are coming out later this year," Bennett explained. "But Emma's enthusiastic and she wanted to race in Italy, which is nice.

"She may run at Portsmouth on Sunday, but she's got a 400m squad day at Loughborough tomorrow, so we'll see what she feels like on Sunday and what the weather's like.

"We know what it can be like down there!"

One Bennett-coached athlete who will be running is reigning Hampshire 400m champion Claire Nichols, who runs for Woking AC but lives in Totton.

Nichols currently has a pb of 55.8 (indoors), but Bennett forecast: "If the weather's okay, she will knock a big chunk off her pb. She's capable of running in the 54s."

Track and field action for under-13s through to seniors takes place tomorrow and Sunday at Portsmouth, starting at 10am on both days.