This is going to be a full-on, comprehensive, top to bottom deep dive of the 2019 women's Australian/New Zealand sprinting season. Or not. I don’t know. You can decide at the end. Either way, I’ll attempt to review, evaluate and calculate the season of every track event that doesn’t have a bell. This article was first published in Australian Athlete Mag.
2019 was a big year from Sam Parsons; a switch to run for Germany and an appearance at the Doha World Championships making 2019 an eventful one for this rising 5000m athlete. Based in Boulder, Colorado, Sam is busy preparing for what will hopefully be a bigger 2020, with the Olympics just a stone throws away.We caught up with Sam to chat about 2019, his training, and heaps more.
Continuing my meandering paper chase through our world cross-country history, we come to the 1977 and 1979 championships in Dusseldorf and Limerick, respectively. The former saw Australia continue to move up with the debut of three 20-year-olds who would be the nucleus of future teams.
But – whatever happened to the women?
Followers of cross-country are used to seeing young runners make significant debuts. Did someone say Kenenisa Bekele? Or Zola Budd who, like Bekele, was a senior world champion before her 20 th birthday. Bekele, indeed, not only won the short-lived short race in 2001, but did the double a year later, all still three months before turning 20.
Given the painfully slow historic process of admitting that women were capable of running long distances, would it surprise you to learn that women led the adoption of annual Australian cross-country championships.
Yes, it would, I’m presuming you replied. It certainly came as a shock to me. Yet, in 1960,...
It’s getting to the end of the year, that time when you start to reflect on your favourite things of the previous 12 months.
Of course, we’ve only had just short of 11 months of 2019, which is one of the perils of end-of-the-year reflection. One of my perennially favourite...
WHAT I THINK ABOUT WHEN I THINK ABOUT FOOD | A COLUMN BY DAVID MCNEILL
At the risk of being condescending, and calling all runners control freaks, my experience is that habitual runners (from the hobby joggers to the Olympic medalists) share qualities of being perfectionist, pedantic, meticulous, and non-compromising....
Sixty years ago, on 6 September, 1960, Herb Elliott won a gold medal in the 1500 metres at the Rome Olympic Games in a world record three minutes 35.6 seconds.
Sounds a little mundane when you write it like that, doesn’t it. There was nothing even remotely mundane about Elliott’s...
A column by Jaryd Clifford – Runner’s Tribe
Dreams and nightmares are conflicting phenomena. One is what we endeavour for, the reason for the toil; the other is simply what we hope never takes place, the dreaded disaster. In running, they are untamed beasts, bestowed with unbridled power, wilfully determining the...
