Hannah Miley is a tough cookie. The 28 year-old has not managed to sustain a career at the top of world swimming for over a decade without having more than a hint of steeliness and, as every athlete who has had a career of such longevity knows, the ability to bounce back from disappointment is vital.

On week after returning from Budapest, Miley has had time to reflect on her performance at her fifth World Championships in which an eighth-place finish in the 400m individual medley left her distinctly disillusioned. After a recent move to Aberdeen from Inverurie, big things were expected of the double Commonwealth champion. She was, however, left trailing eventual champion, Katinka Hosszu of Hungary, by nine seconds. “It was disappointing – it wasn’t the swim that was expected of me and it definitely wasn’t the swim I knew I was capable of,” she said. “It was so strange because it didn’t feel like it was me racing. It just didn’t feel like it was my body. That was the first time I’d ever felt like that and I can’t explain it. Physically, I was in the best shape I could have been in but sitting down with my coach and looking at my last phase of training, I do think that there was maybe some things that could have been better.”

There is though, little chance of Miley wallowing in self-pity. “I’m not one to make excuses – the performance was what it was and I just need to move on,” she told Herald Sport ahead of a swim clinic supported by her main sponsor, legal firm Watermans. “It’s given me the motivation to make sure that I don’t let that happen again. I know that I need to be smarter and more specific with my training going forward. I don’t plan to sit and dwell on it, I just need to make sure that I learn from it and get it right for next year.”

Miley admits that she has she has changed as a person over the past year as a result of her experience at the Rio Olympics. A fourth-place finish, just 0.15 seconds away from her first Olympic medal, was an agonising near miss but it changed her perspective in a way that nothing else ever had. “I struggled to get over Rio because I had the disappointment of not getting a medal but then I was really happy with one of the best performances I’d ever done at an Olympic Games,” she said. “The media kept asking how I felt after my disappointment in Rio so I had to really fight to remind myself that it wasn’t. When I was up against that, it made me look at how I viewed things and it didn’t click until I saw a quote from Misty Hyman [an American swimmer]. She said: “If we take the things that we think are the worst things that can possibly happen in our lives and we turn them around, they can turn out to be big opportunities. And we can find a way to make ourselves better because of them”. That really hit home with me because while being a swimmer is great, at the end of the day, I want to be a good person. I realised that I couldn’t throw the teddy out of the pram because that would just make me bitter and I’d then become selfish and that’s not the person I want to be.”

Miley has the opportunity to bounce back in the most emphatic fashion though. The 2018 Commonwealth Games are now less than eight months away and Miley will be attempting to become the first Scot to win gold at three consecutive Games. While she realises that too much time focusing on silverware would be dangerous, she admits that she does allow herself the odd moment to fantasise about making history. “I do think about it sometimes,” she said. “I dream about it more when I’m training than when I’m lying in bed at night actually. What spurs you on is the rewards you could get. So yeah, I do think about what would it be like to be on that podium although I know I have to focus on the process because because in the lead-up to Rio, all I was thinking about was that I had to get a medal and so when you don’t get it, you’re like, now what? Medals are great to show for your efforts but it’s not always going to go your way and so while I’d love to sit and dream about gold, I’m aware that I have to focus on the process in order to give myself the opportunity to get to that end point.”