Tokyo Preview Hannah Briers
For most athletes, the dates of the World Championship had been highlighted in their calendars months ago. Hannah Briers, a Welsh 400m runner, hardly gave Tokyo a second thought. In fact, she and her partner booked a vacation in mid-September. At the British Championship, she had run 52.29 and finished 7th, so she was well outside the top 2 Tokyo selection criteria.
She is coached by Rhys Williams, a former GB 400m hurdler, of whom she says: “Rhys is brilliant. I really, really enjoy having Rhys as a coach. He’s the most positive person I’ve ever met, regardless of how I’m feeling. It could be the worst day ever at work, and Rhys will go, ‘Right, come on, spikes on. Remember that in 10 years, you’ll look back on days like this and wish you could still do it. ’ I think that’s the sort of unique aspect that he brings into training, that he’s done it all before. He’s been an athlete. He knows exactly what it’s like to retire from the sport, and he’s gone, like you really need to enjoy the time that you’re in now. He’s a perfectionist. Everything is very detailed. Everything is in order. He’s really caring and he really wants the best for me in my performance”.
To start with, Hannah is not a full-time, sponsored athlete. She works Monday to Friday 9-5 as a local authority youth worker helping “young people who are not in education, employment or training and who might be dealing with a lot of personal issues, mental health or youth homelessness. Their confidence is often really low. And it’s my job to get them back on a positive path. So that could be getting them back into education, getting them back into some training, or it could just be finding them somewhere to live, or being just that sort of friendly person that they can come to and help solve any of the problems that they have”.
She trains either before work or after work. She admits that it is hard going: “I work a normal nine-to-five job, Monday to Friday, and then train six days a week, which is a little bit ridiculous”.
Yet she sees advantages to her lifestyle. “The two parts complement each other in terms of like a bad day on the track is not a bad day in reality when I’m dealing with some really, really big issues that some of the young people have and I’m thinking, ‘gosh, the time that I ran on the weekend is really not that bad compared to some of the things these young people are…
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