Next week, athletes from across Canberra will arrive at the track for the ACT 13 Years and Over Championships. For some of the FAST athletes among them, the surroundings and routines will be very familiar. They have competed at ACT Championships before, represented the Territory at national level and learned through experience what it feels like when the warm-up track gets busy and the races begin to matter.
For others, almost everything will be new.
Over the past few weeks, our regular FAST Performance athletes have been joined at training by a number of young athletes who qualified through their school competitions and are now preparing for their first significant appearance on the ACT track and field stage. Some arrived knowing very few people in the squad. Some are still learning the routines and language of sprint training. Next week, they will stand on the same track as athletes who were once experiencing exactly the same thing.
That mixture has made the final weeks before the Championships particularly enjoyable to watch.
Different Athletes, Same Track
There is something valuable about an experienced athlete training beside someone preparing for their first championship.
For the experienced athlete, another ACT Championships comes with expectations. They may know their ranking, their personal best and the performances of the athletes they are likely to race. Some are chasing finals and medals, others selection standards or performances that have occupied their thoughts for months. They have enough competition experience to know what they want from the week.
A first-time championship athlete sees things differently. Simply qualifying may already have represented a significant achievement. Their questions aren’t necessarily about rankings or medals; they may be wondering what the call room is like, when they should warm up, whether they are good enough to be there or what happens when they find themselves in a lane beside someone much faster.
Those athletes don’t need to be protected from competition. They need the opportunity to experience it.
Qualifying has already answered the most important question: they have earned the right to be there.
One of the things we hope FAST can provide is an environment where those first experiences happen alongside athletes who have travelled further down the same road. A young athlete can look across a training session and see someone preparing for another national campaign, while that more experienced athlete is reminded that there was once a first championship for them too.
The Work Before the Result
Most people will only see what happens next week.
They will see the start lists and results. They will see who makes finals, who produces a PB and who stands on a podium. Those performances matter, and we make no apology for caring about them. FAST is a performance environment and competition is one of the places where athletes discover whether the things they have been developing in training can be expressed when it counts.
What the results won’t show is everything that preceded them.
They won’t show the cold Canberra evenings at training, the repetitions that didn’t quite work, the technical changes that took weeks to become comfortable or the athlete who gradually became confident enough to run faster. They won’t distinguish between someone completing another session in a training environment they have known for years and another athlete nervously walking into that same group for the first time.
The photographs from these final weeks capture some of that story. There are familiar faces who have trained consistently throughout the year, athletes whose preparations have been interrupted and who have had to adapt, and new faces who have arrived because success at school competition opened another door.
Next week, the stopwatch will treat all of them exactly the same. Their journeys to the start line have been anything but identical.
Nothing to Prove in the Final Week
There can be a temptation before an important competition to squeeze in one more hard session or search for one last improvement. If an athlete is racing next week, however, there is very little fitness we can create now that will suddenly transform their performance.
There is plenty we can interfere with.
Our focus during the final preparation is therefore on preserving the qualities athletes need while reducing unnecessary fatigue. Sprinters still need to feel acceleration and speed. Hurdlers and jumpers still need rhythm and confidence in their event. Middle-distance athletes still need contact with the appropriate intensity and race demands. The amount each athlete requires, however, depends on the athlete and the preparation they bring into the week.
For some, the final sessions will provide an important opportunity to sharpen something. Others need very little beyond maintaining familiarity and allowing their body to arrive fresh.
The objective isn’t to complete every possible piece of training before Championships. It is to arrive capable of expressing the work that has already been done.
What Will Success Look Like?
Hopefully, there will be FAST personal bests next week. We would love to see athletes progress through rounds, make finals, win medals and achieve selection performances. Those things deserve to be celebrated when they happen.
But one of the lessons reinforced by our work examining years of ACT junior athletics results is that a performance at one particular age is information, not destiny. Young athletes develop at very different rates, and the athlete leading an age group today will not necessarily be the athlete leading it several years from now.
That perspective matters at a championship.
For an established athlete, success might genuinely mean competing for a medal or producing the performance they have spent months preparing for. For another athlete, it might mean executing the first 30 metres of a race better than they ever have before. For someone appearing at this level for the first time, simply learning how to navigate a championship, compete confidently and leave wanting to do it again can be an important step in a much longer athletic journey.
We don’t need to pretend that every result is equally good. Athletes are allowed to be delighted by a great performance and disappointed when something doesn’t go the way they hoped. Both experiences teach us something.
What we shouldn’t do is use one afternoon in a young athlete’s development to decide what they may eventually become.
From First-Timers to National Athletes
Perhaps that is what has been most satisfying about watching this particular group train together.
FAST now has athletes at remarkably different stages of their development sharing the same environment. There are athletes preparing for their first ACT Championships alongside athletes who have competed at Australian Championships. There are young people who have only recently discovered athletics beside others who have spent years refining the smallest parts of their event.
They don’t all need the same coaching and they certainly don’t all have the same expectations, but they can still learn in the same environment.
That is an important part of what we want FAST Performance to be.
A first-time athlete doesn’t need to arrive looking like a national athlete. They need somewhere appropriate to begin. The more experienced athlete, meanwhile, needs an environment that continues to challenge them as the margins become smaller and their ambitions become larger.
There should be room for both.
Next Week, We Race
By the time the first athlete is called to their marks next week, there won’t be much more for us to say.
The sessions will have been completed. The final technical reminders will have been given. Athletes will know their events, their warm-up and the things we have been working on together. Then competition gets to do what competition does: provide an answer we cannot completely know beforehand.
Some athletes will surprise themselves. Some will confirm what training has been suggesting. Others will walk away knowing there is more work to do. Somewhere among them will be a young athlete experiencing the nerves, excitement and uncertainty of their first significant championship.
Years from now, that first appearance may turn out to have been the beginning of something much bigger.
Or it may simply become a great memory of representing their school, racing at the ACT Championships and discovering how much fun athletics can be.
Both outcomes are worthwhile.
To every FAST athlete preparing to compete next week: enjoy these final sessions, trust the work you have done and, when your opportunity arrives, go and compete.
We’ll be watching.
FAST Performance | Centre of Running Excellence
Running Excellence grows. 🖤❤️
Comments are closed