She did not break into the top thirty at either the 2002 or 2003 World Cross Country Championships. She represented Portugal at the Olympics for the first time at the 2004 Athens Games. Running in the 5000 metres, she performed poorly and finished 18th with 16:03.75 – fifty seconds slower than her best that season. After finishing just outside the top 25 runners at the 2005 World Cross Country Championships, she experimented with a switch to the steeplechase. She finished in 13th place in the 3000 m steeplechase at the 2005 World Championships in Athletics. The next two years saw her career stall: after a poor 64th-place finish in the World Cross Country Championships she ran infrequently and only returned to competition in mid-2007.