Summer athletics enters its final stages
Last track and field meeting on Sunday to be live streamed on Activegsy.com
ATHLETES are rounding off their summer season with one eye already turning to setting a strong base for Island Games qualification.
The last Guernsey Athletics’ meeting of the year is on Sunday [12 September], with events on the track and in the field in a busy programme that will be live streamed on activegsy.com and our Facebook channel from 10.45am.
Last Sunday the field competitors had the spotlight to themselves.
Spectator Guide to Sunday
Events get under way with the 100m.Island Games Champion Joe Chadwick will take part in his first outdoor race since the Gibraltar final in July 2019.Josh Duke will hope to stay close to the sub-11 man. On the women’s side, expect a close race between Rhiannon Dowinton and Amelia Hart. Both have gone under 13sec this summer.
Out in the field, 12 people will take part in the javelin. James Bougourd should lead the throwers, with Ali Higgins the leading women. Competition will filter right down through the age groups.
In the shot circle, Steven Marley is aiming to make progress towards the Island Games standard.
As the meeting moves on, attention on the track will turn to the 200m. Chadwick will aim to run under 22sec in his favoured event and could push the Commonwealth Games B standard if he overcomes the race rustiness. There is good depth to this race, with the likes of Dale Garland, Ben Stevens and Josh Avery.
A broken arm has robbed Tim Ap Sion of much of this season after setting records in the long jump in the U15 ranks last summer. He is back to build on that as an U17. Vicky Hancock is the leading woman having been consistently over 5m this summer.
The discus sees entries across the age categories, from U13 Edward Robinson to M60 Chris Chalmers. Tom Brierly will lead this field.
Close racing is expected in the 1500m, with leading women Nix Petit and Emma Etheredge joined in the race by some men who will run similar times.
Proceedings will close with two rounds of 400m. Josh Duke is chasing a sub-50 clocking, one of the traditional benchmark standards locally, and will be joined in the race by his coach Tom Druce hoping to help him with that. Added to that mix is Gian-Luca Robilliard dropping down from his favoured 800m, where he has been running at a national standard.
The meeting will also be a platform to some of the younger athletes, with the U11 Quadkids events in the programme to give them experience.
In the discus, Tom Brierley saved his best until last with a 34.50m throw, channeling some frustration after his previous three rounds had dipped below the 33m mark.
He had been throwing well in the build-up so was hoping for a good competition.
He started 33.20m, near his season’s best of 33.37m.
‘I basically went through the whole competition thinking there is a little bit more in the tank that I was just trying to find,’ he said.
He will compete for one last time this season on Sunday.
‘Going into a discus circle you want one or two technical things to think about,’ he said after Sunday’s competition.
‘I’ve had an issue lately where I’m literally throwing the discus up into the sky and scooping it at the bottom. So the main thing I’ve been thinking is keep my chest up, keep my shoulders level, and just go as fast as I can.’
The lead up week to an event sees training tapering off and becoming more specific.
‘I had a session on Tuesday which was just a normal session, starting off with drills, I did around 30 throws in the session and then I did a little one on Wednesday,’ said Brierley.
‘As you are getting closer you want to keep doing a little bit to keep the tension but you don’t want to tire yourself out.
‘On Wednesday and Friday I came in, warmed up, and basically did exactly what you would do in the competition: have a couple of warm up throws, do six throws, and call it there. There is no real technical focus, nothing new for sure, you just have to take what you have got going for you at that moment. I did the same Friday.’
After Sunday, the conversation will turn to how to approach winter.
‘Usually we have a break where we do a little conditioning, mobility, and get everything ready for a pretty hard winter: lots of sprints, lots of jumps, maybe weighted throws, so doing throws with a heavier discus to improve specific strength. Just get as explosive as possible and have time in the gym as well to just get generally stronger.’
He said that he would love to throw 40m next year.
‘I think that’s a reasonable target. PBing last year and managing to maintain it this year, even with Covid and all of that disruption. I think with a nice solid winter over here, this is my first winter back after university, so I’ll be able to get some good work in.’
Sofia Mella (pictured below) faced the tough ask of being the only competitor in the triple jump last week.
Her longest effort came in the second round with 10.44m, just 2cms off her season’s best from July.
There followed a sequence of three no jumps before she was back on the board for her final effort of the meet.
‘It probably wasn’t my best jumping, but there were a few no jumps that were bigger,’ she said.
‘I think that was a positive performance, there are things to work on, things that went well, but it’s coming to the end of the season and everybody is getting a bit tired.’
Mella is a focused competitor as she prepares for each jump.
‘I stare down the runway, try and calm myself and try not to think about anything. If you think about things too much it’s what confuses you, and if you try and focus on a certain aspect, especially in triple jump, you focus on that too much and everything else ends up going not as well.’
After each effort, she took time to talk through what happened with her coach, watching replays on an i-Pad.
‘I was jumping fine to start with but then I had a no jump in the third round. So I can move my run up backwards or forwards, whatever suits how I am at the board. I stop and chat with my coach about how far we need to adjust.’
She will compete in the long jump on Sunday.
Mella wants to secure a spot in the 2023 Island Games.
‘I’m hoping to go to university next year, so it’s about training in the winter and putting good performances together next year to get qualified before I go off,’ she said.
‘This year was really disrupted with lockdown right in the middle of winter training in quite an important block so I think the performances I have done this season are fairly good and put me in a good place.’
Jonny Guille continued to show signs of progress in the hammer having transitioned from the jumps this season.
Having hit 34m once for the first time ever at the last field meeting in July, this time four of his six throws bettered that mark, with a new PB of 34.94 set in the second round.
He opened with 34.72.
‘I was trying to nail the technique and managed to do that with the first two. One of them I lost balance slightly but still managed to get the hammer out. In some ways it’s good when you lose control a little bit and you can still get it out the cage, but obviously you would prefer to be ideal all the way through.’
He had been throwing well in training and benefited from the consistency of the previous two weeks.
It has taken a good six months to learn the control needed.
‘The transition [from jumps] has been good because although the rotation is completely new for me, there’s still a lot of strength aspects in your core and your legs, so in that sense I’ve got a good plyometric base and strength in my legs, so that’s been good,’ he said.
‘When we started in the winter I was looking at Sia Banbury and thinking “how on earth am I going to replicate that?”.
‘But now I’m getting into it comfortably on two turns and hopefully over winter adding a third and see where we go from there.’
Guille said that you just need to add hundreds of throws to get the technique down.
‘You start by being incompetent and then slowly it becomes autonomous and you keep it in your brain and then it’s just littler tweaks rather than learning the whole movement pattern.’
The Island Games A standard is 44m and for the B is 41.50m.
‘I’m hoping next year to see numbers beginning with fours, but you have to take it bit by bit.’
Coming to a new sport later in his career has not phased Guille, who is grateful for the assistance of throws coach Lydia Banbury who is there wind, rain and shine.
‘I’m happy to look at all the technical nuances and small things, so I think that helps me to learn. I enjoy learning something new. Yes, you always want to throw further, but at the same time you won’t throw further unless you put the time in to learn properly.
‘I’m quite happy to be patient and see what happens. They say really it’s four to five years to reach your peak in hammer, so hopefully I will throw far enough to represent Guernsey at this Games, but in some ways targeting the Orkney Games because that’s where I should really be hitting my stride.’
Shannen Higgins last competed in 2011, making it to the Island Games two years earlier for the 400m. She stopped athletics after getting glandular fever.
On Sunday she equalled her best in the high jump from a decade ago, before three failures at 1.45m – made all the more frustrating when she had another attempt after the competition closed and cleared that height.
‘Last summer I decided to come back to keep fit and it’s going ok. I’m hoping to maybe pick up the high jump again,’ she said.
Coming back to the track has been hard, she said.
‘It’s a bit intimidating because there’s lots more young people, they have a lot more energy than you and they don’t have as much commitment outside in life as you do.
‘In my head I’ve got my own standards that I want to reach, it’s just trying to get back to those standards is quite tricky mentally. That got into my head a little bit today.’
She has been training with Tom Druce on speed endurance and doing some high jump work with Lee Merrien.
‘I wasn’t intending on going back into high jump but then the mat was open a few months ago and I thought “I’ll have a few jumps over that”’.
She opened at 1.30m.
‘I was clearing all my jumps well,’ she said.
‘I think the issue is that I told myself today that I’d like to clear 1.45m and then I know I’m in good stead for next year. So as soon as 1.45m came up I just forgot everything I knew about high jumping, but that’s part of the sport. When you only have a few seconds to try and do a jump, if you think about it too much, it doesn’t work.’
The Island Games standard is 1.52m.
Higgins is an athlete that uses visualisation before each jump.
‘I see myself jumping over the bar before I do it. I have a seven step run up. So it’s one, two, three, one two three pop and I go over. And I can see myself doing that before I do it. Whether or not I replicate that before I do the jump is questionable.
‘You bound and then speed up towards the end. It’s that speed, that running motion, that gives you the spring rather than trying to push off the ground, it’s more a plyometric response.’
Full details of Sunday’s meeting are available here. It concludes with a high-quality 400m at around 1pm.
