A few weekends ago, another group of Exeter University sprinters and horizontal jumpers made the journey to Cardiff for the second indoor open meeting of the year. 10 athletes produced 22 performances. Some of the athletes had never competed before, most hadn’t competed many times before. Of note, Georgia ran 8.37 for the 60m and 27.98 for the 200m in her first ever, proper athletics competition. Not only were the times good, but her attitude was fantastic too, even dipping for the line when she was clearly ahead in her races. Georgia has only been training for athletics since September 2024, and her training up until this point has been understandably inconsistent due to freshers’ bugs and partying, as well as the dreaded freshers’ shin splints (I have a theory that this is due to time spend in hard shoes in night clubs!).

Phoebe ran a PB in her 60m, as did Ade. The latter having ran badly in his first race due to not sleeping properly the night before! A similar level of mental resilience came from Lucy who also ran disappointingly in her first race, only to bounce back with a good time in her second race. Grace and Ellie also ran well considering they hadn’t trained over the long Christmas break (they were as fast as they were before Christmas), and Maurice and Bill were very close to PBs in their races. Maurice, Bill and Cam had their first outings in the triple jump and performed well. They weren’t jumping off full approaches, looking to build up towards this at BUCS in February. Of note, Cam jumper his best distance since 2020 and Bill demonstrated that he’s got a big jump in him if he nails his run up. Last but not least, Ayo ran a good opening time in the 200m. She looked very explosive out of the blocks but struggled a bit in the last 50m. This is the final piece in the puzzle and we’ll be working on speed endurance in the coming weeks, peaking for BUCS Indoors.

To summarise, another fantastic demonstration that we’re doing things right and I’m happy with how my sprint coaching is going. We’ve got so many more athletes willing to have fun competing that we did last year, and the athletes are competing well. Fingers crossed we peak nicely at BUCS Indoors!

Outside of the athletics coaching, I continue to enjoy my Personal Training in Exeter.