Ennis, 22, a member of the City of Sheffield club, established herself among the contenders for Olympic glory when she finished fourth in the World Championships in Osaka last year after claiming the bronze medal in the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne.

Her personal best in the gruelling seven-discipline event which runs over two days is the 6,469 she amassed in Japan and now she reckons 6,600 will be required to earn a place on the podium in China. She is training twice a day for six days a week and there are impressive signs that she can reach her target.

She has already improved her personal best in the javelin, improving by over four metres. She threw 40.06m at the Don Valley Stadium on April 21 to beat her previous best by two metres and her second throw also surpassed her earlier best.

She did even better in last weekend's Northern League fixtures, taking her javelin best to 42.45m, and she willingly acknowledges the help she has had from Leeds-based former World Championship medallist Mick Hill.

"I have been working with Mick twice a week," she said. "My throwing has come on a lot and that performance in Sheffield was not achieved in the best of conditions. We have been working on all aspects of technique and I have also changed my run-up."

She will be competing in the high jump, the hurdles and the 200m at the Yorkshire Championships on her home track this weekend and will attempt to further improve her javelin best at an international meeting at Loughborough the following weekend. Gotzis in Austria is next on her schedule and she aims to be in action most weekends until the British team head for their pre-Olympic base in Macau. "Once we get there I will wind down, have a rest before we move on to Beijing," she said.

There has been much speculation that Olympic and World champion Carolina Kluft will not be defending her heptathlon title in Beijing and her absence from the event would obviously improve medal chances for Ennis and her fellow Briton Kelly Sotherton.

"We keep hearing that Kluft is not going to be there or that she is not going to do the heptathlon, but she can always change her mind," said Ennis. "I can't start worrying about what she is going to do; I can only concentrate on what I have to do."

That is simple: find the necessary points to take her from where she was in Osaka to where she wants to be in Beijing. "Basically, I have to keep gradually improving in the events I am already strong in – the hurdles and the high jump – and work hard on the long jump and the throwing events," she said.

Her recent javelin effort underlined the thinking; those extra two metres would have been worth 38 points in heptathlon competition. If she can keep chipping away like that then her target will soon be within reach.

Her progress has been impressive in the last 12 months since she completed her degree course and has been able to concentrate on athletics with her coach Toni Minichiello, but she accepts that, at 22, she is not yet at her peak.

"By the time London comes round in 2012, I will be 26 – getting old – and that might be the time for me," she says.