WITH HIS SEASON OFF to a propitious start after a 44.94 flat 400 win at the Florida Relays, Rai Benjamin, silver medalist in the 400H at the last three global championships, says, “It’s all perspective for me and I’m not putting any pressure on myself whatsoever.”
As he prepares for another summer of vying for hurdles supremacy with Karsten Warholm, the No. 2 man on the all-time list is working on a self-improvement project.
“Personally for me, I’m trying to explore a new technique,” Benjamin explains. “I’ve changed my step pattern and how I run the race. I think for me it’s going to be probably like a year project.
“Essentially I’m going to go 13 steps to 2, 12 to 3, 12 to 4, 13s the rest of the way. So that’s the pattern I’m working on now and slowly but surely getting it down. I’m excited to go out there and race confidently. I think last year was really, really tough. Last year I was just managing the race instead of confidently running my own race.”
How true that is — due to factors Benjamin kept under his hat throughout the ’22 campaign. If anything, it’s an understatement. The fact is he hurdled to the silver medal in Eugene last July clocking 46.89, history’s No. 10 all-time mark, with minimal fitness and one torn hamstring tendon partially detached from his pelvis.
The muscle, as he puts it, “was screaming at me,” a cacophony of pain it had unleashed with regularity since mid-May — when Benjamin was able to run at all last summer. Which is not to say often.
He can show you the images of the damaged tendon-to-bone anchorage, eventually healed through medical intervention and a 2-month post-Worlds rest period, a digital souvenir from an arduous year.
The tale of a season Benjamin was lucky to make it through in one piece is wince-provoking.
“At the beginning of the year,” Benjamin says, “I had a high hamstring issue, and I’ve had it before and it usually subsides, but as we got through the entire year it just didn’t go away.”
He opened his ’22 barriers season on May 08 in Tokyo and hurdled 48.60. The hamstring, he says, “was bothering me a bit, but it really flared up in Doha,” a 47.49 race in which Benjamin finished 0.25 down to Alison dos Santos as the Brazilian rolled into what would be an undefeated season. (Felled by a training accident, dos…
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