Five months after her disappointing showing at the Sydney Olympics, Bern's Anita Weyermann has got back into her stride by smashing a 20-year-old record at the Swiss Indoor championships in Magglingen.

The 23-year-old middle distance runner finished the 3,000-metre race in a time of 9'29"42 on Sunday, knocking almost 15 seconds off Elise Wattendorf's 1971 record.

The feeling of running a good race is likely to mean more to Weyermann than the record. Last week, after a frustrating seventh place at a cross-country race in Diekirch, Weyermann spoke for the first time of the fears which she has started to suffer at the start of races.

While Weyermann continued the fight to get back to her best, another Bernese runner was making headlines in the men's 400 metres. Twenty-nine year-old Alain Rohr saw off challenges from Nicolas Baeriswyl and André Bucher to win the race with a time of 46"57.

Rohr's time was four tenths of a second faster than the limit set for next month's world indoor championships in Lisbon, allowing him to join Bucher and Peter Philipp in a three-man Swiss delegation.

Bucher, who is among the world's best runners in the 800-metre discipline, said he wasn't too disappointed at coming third in his first indoor 400-metre race.

"As far as speed goes I think I'm prepared," he explained after the race. "My pace in the final sprint felt right."

Sixty metres sprinter Daniel Dubois was the fourth man to fulfil the Lisbon qualifying limit, but the Zurich runner announced that he would be skipping the tournament in order to concentrate on his summer season.

swissinfo with agencies

In compliance with the JTI standards

More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative