Jazmin Sawyers is Back! – runblogrun

Jazmin Sawyers is back!

Jazmin Sawyers jumped 6.53 in her first competition since 2023 following her Achilles injury. It was at the Loughborough International and she said afterwards:

“It felt so good but I was more nervous than I can ever remember before a competition. My heart rate’s been high all day. I haven’t been able to be calm. But to be back, and to feel like myself and to jump the kind of distance that I have opened with in any other normal season, I’m so pleased. A 6.53 opener is fine any year but I want to build on that. The UKA standard for the World Championship is 6.75. I’ve got to build that back up and hopefully get back to my best but it was generally encouraging for me”.

2023 had started so well with her joining the 7 meter club with that amazing leap at the European Indoors in Istanbul. She was ready to kick on and then the injury came.

What does 7m feel like?  I asked her a week or two after it: “It’s hard, genuinely hard to put into words because it’s only one centimetre more than 6:99. But it means so much more. It’s such a specific benchmark that you know that everybody talks about.  When we talk about winning global medals, you say, ‘well, if you get over 7m, you can win a global medal’. You get over 7m and you can win an Olympic medal that. It is genuinely that sort of super real elite world class long jump mark that I’ve been striving for it for so long that it started to feel mythical. It started to feel like this thing that was always going to be just out of reach”. It’s like you keep trying for it and you know you’re capable of it. But when you’ve tried for so long and haven’t done it,  it almost…even though I believed I was capable, it still shocked me.

Typically she gave a lot of  credit to her coach, Aston Moore: “Aston’s training programme is structured, there’s still work to do. There will be no crazy changes. We’re still working on things. There’s things that I went into this indoor championships knowing I didn’t have right. And so we just keep going. I don’t want to treat it like some crazy thing. And that’s what’s nice? It didn’t feel like crazy, it didn’t feel different as a jump. It just felt like a good jump”.

And you can’t…