Morgan Lake chose the hard route into the high jump final on the second morning of the European Athletics Junior Championships in Eskilstuna.
Great Britain's world junior champion has a personal best of 1.94m from this summer, but after entering the competition at 1.79m, she knocked the bar off on her first two attempts.
Now, suddenly this was not quite the straightforward day Lake might have expected ahead of Sunday's final, not that she was taking anything for granted.
But the 18-year-old showed her true character by composing herself well and going over on her third go and now she can relax for two days before she bids for gold.
'I was really nervous (going into her final attempt),' said Lake. 'The last jump was horrible but I knew I could do it because I do it in training all the time and I did 1.80m in warm up.
'We’d been sitting around for quite a while so I wasn’t that fresh going into the first attempt and just brushed it over. The second one was a bit rushed and the run up wasn’t great, so I had to leave it up to the final attempt.'
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The distance of 1.79m became the cut-off point for qualifying and if Lake needed any consolation how tough this part of an event can be, her closest rival, Ukraine's Yuliya Levchenko, 17, with a 2015 personal best of 1.92m, failed on her first two attempts at 1.75m before making it at the third go and then going over at 1.79m with her first jump.
It was a tremendous morning in the hammer for Norway's Beatrice Nedberge Llano, 17, who produced a national junior record of 66.15m in the first round as her sizzling effort took her personal best from 64.40m, a distance she threw only last month.
Britain's Adam Hague, the No. 1 European junior this year, reached the pole vault final by clearing 5.05m with his only effort, while in the 400m hurdles, Belgium's Nenah de Coninck ran a personal best of 58.31 as the fastest qualifier from the women's event and in the men's, Britain's Jack Lawrie had the best time of 51.91.
Lawrie's teammate Daniel Rowden was the quickest in the men's 800m as he won the last of the five heats in 1:51.35 to progress.
The morning session ended with heats of the two sprint hurdles, with France's Dylan Caty topping the men's 110m in a personal best 13.71 and Petra Repasi, of Hungary, the best in the women's 100m in 13.47.