Anyone with Olympic ambition who says they aren’t allowing for the extra dimension brought by the prospect of Paris is a liar, writes Katharine Merry
With athletes now well into winter training, I’ve been watching a few updates on social media recently which have made me smile. I sent a message offering my thoughts and prayers to Andrew Pozzi after I saw a picture of him doubled over after a session. He’s being coached by Colin Jackson now and had clearly been put through his paces. I do not miss that!
I always found it horrible coming back after my end-of-season break. It was the recurring realisation of how long something takes to achieve and how quick it is to lose. As soon as you take two to three weeks off, your fitness just goes out the window.
What happens is that you are tapering and maintaining for the whole of June, July and August and all of your sessions are completely different but then you completely change everything up and go back to donkey work. That’s the killer.
You’ve taken a bit of time off – during which you might have enjoyed your life – but then you’re going back into a completely different regime and your body goes: “What the hell is going on here?”
The positive is that you always felt like you started with a blank canvas every winter and you were motivated to get back. If you’d had a bad season, been injured or hadn’t really achieved what you’d wanted to, then this was a reset button. That was a nice feeling because it was a case of: “Right, what’s happened before doesn’t matter.”
On the flipside, if you’ve done well then you’re trying to cling on to that momentum and keep it going.
Something that makes a huge difference, regardless of what your form has been like, is going into the winter right before an Olympics. If you’re fully focused, every winter should be a big one but going into Olympic year heightens the senses. There’s more tension, greater expectation of what’s to come, you’re very, very aware of what’s on the horizon and you look at things a little bit more intensely in terms of your preparation.
We’ve even seen it already over the course of 2023, with some athletes making decisions – with Paris in mind – about whether or not to compete in the summer just gone. Jake Wightman, for example, could have raced in the latter part of the summer after his injury troubles but he knew he wasn’t quite where he needed to be so he called it quits for the season.
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