Mark Carroll returns to competitive running in tomorrow's Thanksgiving Day road race in Manchester, Connecticut, and has hopes of repeating last year's victory.

It will be his first outing since the disastrous 5,000 metres at the World Championships in Seville last August when the European bronze medallist over the distance trailed in last. But Carroll has taken his time to recover from that low point and is now ready to prepare for next year's Sydney Olympics.

Health problems, and more specifically a low count of iron in his blood, caused Carroll's form to drop dramatically at a number of stages last summer and it's taken some diligent diet supplementation to bring him back to normal training at his base in Providence, Rhode Island.

"I've definitely put the iron problem behind me now but you do have to stay on top of it to make sure it doesn't creep back," he says.

"The form is good even though it's just mileage training at the moment and this race is always a good indication of how things are progressing at this time of year."

Carroll's win in the highly competitive 4.8-mile race last year saw him join a small group of Irish athletes to have won the event. Some 12,000 runners are expected tomorrow including a number of high-profile Kenyan distance runners.

"I don't necessarily prepare for this race," he says, "and run it off volume training rather than any specific speedwork. But I feel I can run as fast as last year and we'll just have to see whether that's good enough to win."

More importantly, Carroll has prepared his schedule for the coming indoor season with the main target the European Championships in Ghent next February.

He will return to his usual winter training base in Florida after Christmas for more specific preparations for that event.

Despite his poor showing in Seville, the Cork man is still the only Irish athlete who ended up with a top 10 placing in the IAAF world rankings for 1999. His 3,000 metres time of seven minutes 30.36 seconds in Monaco last August, which improved his own Irish record by three seconds, left him seventh fastest in the world.

The next best Irish athlete was Peter Coghlan, who also ran an Irish record of 13.30 seconds for the 110 metres hurdles to rank him 19th fastest in the world.