London

My previous issue, on appearance and track toilets, is now free for all to read. Thanks again to my paid subscribers who get early access and support my running career!

Imagine walking inside a small room that’s totally blacked out, so all you can do is focus on a 360-degree soundscape of an audience clapping and cheering. Taryn Simon exhibited an installation like this at Buxton Contemporary’s The same crowd never gathers twice. Her “Assembled Audience” caused my heart rate to immediately spike. I was flooded with memories of standing on a start line. Being inside that room gave me the same unnerving feeling of being seen by many while the crowd itself remains an anonymous mass.

This week, let’s experience a sporting space with audio. Nathan used his phone to record the Diamond League meet at London Stadium on July 19, where I paced the women’s mile. The quality is low but the vibes are high.

Let’s walk to our seats.

British people love athletics. At the Birmingham Commonwealth Games in 2022, I remember being perplexed by how every session was full, even morning sessions that were usually only qualifying rounds.

The mile was near the end of the program. Here we’re being introduced with the classic Diamond League intro music. I’m up first, introduced as the pace maker. The roar of the crowd gives you an idea of how popular an athlete is.

In the warm-up area shortly before the race, Gudaf Tsegay’s coach asked me if I would run three seconds faster for the 800 than the time given in my brief. The pacing lights had already been set, so I was confused by this request, and with the man’s poor English and lack of eye contact, I just stupidly said “huh?”

Jess Hull was standing next to me at the time, and she knew this man. She shut him down quickly, and explained that if Gudaf wanted faster, she’d have to do it herself. Which she did. Gudaf chose to overtake me after 150 metres. Running in front of the pacer is an audacious and confusing move, but on brand for Gudaf, who is notoriously chaotic on the track. You can hear spectators in the audio discussing the turn of events. She ended up winning in a meet record (whatever) but she faded fast at the end and probably could have run faster with smarter pacing!

There are multiple events taking place on the field while each track race runs and you can hear the commentator referring to that action mid-race. It’s what makes athletics a much better in-person sport than broadcast, because you can take in all the action at once.

Local Brit Morgan Lake won the high jump and made an attempt at 2m:

Field event athletes can draw the attention of the crowd and harness their energy with coordinated claps.

Time to join the sea of people and slowly make our way out of the crater.

Spectators line the concourse, and can watch athletes doing their cool-down jogs on the warm-up track next to the stadium. Each time the athletes pass by on the track loop, fans try to get their attention. I enjoy this kind of informal moment, perhaps unintentional on the part of the designer, but I’ve jogged with shy athletes who will avoid eye contact and pretend they can’t hear anything.

From an outcome perspective, this year has sucked. I’m keeping the hope alive that I can come in clutch and make the World Champs team.

The last couple weeks I raced two British Milers Club meets, including a season’s best in Watford (2:01.7), a good three seconds off where I need to be. Baby steps.

Pacing at London Diamond League was fun and familiar. I’ve run two personal bests at this meet and even though I was only pacing, it felt incredible to be out there in a full stadium of 60,000 people, as you experienced in the audio above. Also, since I missed the domestic season with injury, I hadn’t seen many of the other Australians since Paris last year, so London felt like a family reunion.

That said, I felt a bit like a spare prick*. The previous year’s meet I had actually been a competitor. Pacers are generally elite athletes who do it for extra cash because they can’t get into the top-level meets. Right now I can barely get into third-tier meets, and with all the extra travel this year I’m financially in the red.

*The British idiom ‘spare prick’ means superfluous or awkwardly out of place, and was taught to me by training partners Sarah Healy and Erin Wallace.

Since I haven’t been feeling like myself, I wanted to do a session that I’d done in the past and compare how I feel now to how it felt then. Many of my group are away in Portugal for a mini-camp, so after a conversation with the coaches, I decided to take this as an opportunity to try something different on my own.

I did 3 sets of 4 x 200m reps with 30 seconds recovery between reps and 4 minutes between sets, a session I did back in 2023, almost exactly two years ago, and about five days before I ran my personal best at the 2023 London Diamond League.

My friend Jane Stockdale, an incredible photographer, came up from London to visit and document the session.

I don’t know exactly what I hoped to gain from this except I wanted to do something familiar and entirely for myself. In the end, there wasn’t a great deal of difference between the two sessions. This year’s session was slightly slower, but within a margin of difference that could be different conditions or fatigue.

So why is my current season’s best 4 seconds slower than in 2023? My little experiment seems to suggest that it’s not only to do with fitness. This is reassuring, albeit bamboozling.

This season of growing pains makes me feel like I’m 24 again, the time I first moved to Melbourne in 2017, joined a proper squad, and started taking my training more seriously. My personal best was 2:09. I was one of the worst athletes in my new group. It was like going from being the cool older kid at my tiny primary school, to a revolting prepubescent high school kid with no friends.

Jane gives great pep talks and has no time for my bullshit. It’s fantastic. “You’re a double Olympian,” she said. “You’ve run fast before. Just go and do it again.” I can’t argue with that logic.

One good thing about personal disasters is that I start asking lots of questions. I’ve reached out to several athletes I admire to get advice and hear about when they faced setbacks.

French athlete Rénelle Lamote described how last year several injuries led to poor early season results, but she was then able to turn it all around and run a PB (at the London Diamond League of course) to make the Olympic team at a home games. She went on to make the Olympic final a month later. She showed me her last training diary entry before running London. At the bottom she’d written “horrible”. She didn’t know at the time that a PB was in her legs, but she fought to the end.

Maybe I have a PB in my legs right now? Only one way to find out.

xoxo Trina