Kaliese Spencer’s success in Daegu contingent upon hard work – IAAF World Athletics Championships
Kaliese Spencer, the 24-year-old Jamaican track and field athlete, who is a 400m hurdles specialist, says that getting rid of procrastination and putting in greater efforts in training for the upcoming IAAF World Athletics Championships, will certainly make way for her in securing a top-podium finish.
Spencer, the Jamaican star is an experienced world championships participant, as this will be her third appearance at the global athletics event. In the last event organised in Berlin, her efforts had pushed her to the final of the discipline. The experienced, yet young athlete has also been into the 2009 IAAF World Athletics Final, where she won a silver medal. Back in 2006, at the age 19, she emerged as a World Junior Champion.
Last weekend, while contesting in London at the Samsung Diamond League meet, she marked her new Personal Best of 52.79 seconds. By clocking this new PB, she has pushed her best rival down by about 0.50 points on the world list.
The humble girl who does not regard herself as the best for the upcoming world level contest, has also strengthened her position as a favourite for the event amid embarking and claiming on three of the five fastest times in the discipline in the current year. The form she has been lately displaying would certainly have left her brimming with confidence, just ahead of the third prestigious athletics event of her professional career.
However, whether it was the over-confidence or her general aptitude that she had been least interested in training lately, is yet to be revealed. In her words, it was due to laziness. She said, “At first I hated going to the gym, I was very lazy. When I first went to Utech (University of Technology in Jamaica) I just did a few light weights in the gym. It was just lazy lifting but from 2008 I started slowly improving my weights and for the past couple of winters I’ve decided to work hard from start to finish.”
Having the formidable task in hand and with the passion to mark her dominance over the track in Daegu, she said that now she was into all kind of trainings, from doing sprint work to track and also, to the gym.
Perhaps, it is the result of these toiling efforts that the young girl feels that her legs have the same amount of energy as her MVP training group has acquired. However, she did not overrule the fact that room for improvement was still there. Analysing her weakness and the areas of improvements, she said, “My squats and are good although I’m no good at bench pressing. I can maybe lift one rep at 110lb, so I’m pretty weak in the arms.”
With three weeks in hand, the Jamaican will have ample amount of time to look over these issues with greater care and do the needful to emerge as the most strenuous runner on the field in South Korea.
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