After the devastation of the foot injury which kept her out of the Beijing Olympics, World No1 heptathlete Jessica Ennis is back in form, boosted by the lifetime-best points tally she accumulated in Italy in May.
Jessica Ennis is not sure whether her mother and father will be making the trip from Sheffield to Berlin to see her go for gold in the heptathlon when the World Championships open on Saturday. Either way, she understands their predicament.
Last year, when she was shown a scan of her right foot and given the devastating news that she was out of the Beijing Olympics, it left her parents, grandparents and her boyfriend considerably out of pocket.
They had already bought non-refundable flights to China as well as accommodation and tickets for the Games. The bill ran into the thousands.
They do not want to make the same mistake this time, though it has nothing to do with money.
"My mum feels that if she buys tickets for Berlin something will go wrong again and it will jinx me," said Ennis. "I'd love them to be there but if they want to watch it at home, that's also fine with me."
Ennis, 23, has clearly inherited her mother's superstitious nature. We are talking across a table at the Loughborough High Performance Centre and she leans over and touches its wooden top with a flourish as she says she is now 100 per cent healthy, with not the slightest twinge by which to remember the injury that threatened to end her athletics career.
She plans to stay like that, too, and has taken to guzzling vitamin pills, washing her hands constantly and avoiding crowds to minimise the risk of swine flu.
It pays not to take any chances when you have already been to the abyss, which in Ennis's case was "a horrible, dingy room" at the Olympic Medical Institute in London where she lay in a hospital bed in May 2008 having blood tests and bone-density scans to try to discover why her right foot had suddenly fractured in two places midway through a heptathlon in Austria.
"It was a massive shock. They told me there and then I would be on crutches for eight to 10 weeks and there was no way I would be doing the Olympics.
"It was the worst type of stress fracture and if I'd carried on and pushed it, it could potentially have been a career-threatening injury.
"I kept myself together for about a minute and then I thought, 'I'm just going to let it all go'. I cried and cried."
She carried on crying until her coach, Tony Minichiello, said enough was enough. He allowed her five days of mourning and then it was back to work. Her foot might have been out of action but there was still upper-body and core-stability training to do.
Fast-forward 14 months and Ennis, now glowing with good health and the knowledge that she is in the shape of her life, goes into the heptathlon on Saturday and Sunday as the world No 1 and Britain's biggest hope of a gold medal.
It is a comeback that has amazed both herself and Minichiello. When, in May this year, she embarked on her first full heptathlon of the season in Desenzano, Italy, the aim was just to secure the 6,100 points necessary to qualify for Berlin. She had, after all, only been able to train properly since January.
At the end of the two days her points total stood at a lifetime best of 6,587. It took her above Kelly Sotherton into third place in the all-time UK rankings and remains the leading score in the world this season. Three months on, she is better still. Further personal bests have come in the shot put, javelin, the 100m hurdles and, most notably, the long jump, despite switching her take-off from her right to her left foot to minimise the risk of future injury.
In the hurdles, the 12.81sec she ran in Germany in June makes her a world-class hurdler in her own right and, if she recovers quickly enough from her heptathlon exertions in Berlin, she will also contest the individual event in Germany.
The hurdles also happens to be the first heptathlon event, followed by another of Ennis's bankers, the high jump. If she performs to her capability in both disciplines, her rivals in Berlin will be playing catch-up from the start.
On current form she is the athlete to beat, though she is not getting carried away. During her rehabilitation she watched the Olympic heptathlon on television and could not fail to be impressed by Ukraine's Nataliya Dobrynska, who won with a huge 6,733 score points. Both she and Russian bronze medallist Tatyana Chernova will be up against Ennis in Berlin.
"I know I stand a very good chance and I'm going to pull out all the stops and do my best,'' she said, ''but I know that athletes like Dobrynska and Chernova always step up their game at major championships and it's going to be extremely tough."
But not as tough as those dark days in May last year when she wondered whether she had a future in athletics.
"I'm just enjoying this year so much and what happened has made me really appreciate things. Now when I have horrible running sessions or sessions that don't go well, I just have to cast my mind back to last year and tell myself, 'At least I'm here and I'm fit and injury-free'."
With that, Ennis leans across and touches the wooden table again. It is not the time to be tempting fate.
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