Hannah Columnist
COCKROFT
Why Hannah’s Dubai display was a huge – and very welcome – surprise!
I
was massively surprised to see the clock stop at 16.77 at the end of my 100m at the World Championships! I’ve not gone close to that time in training and didn’t think I was going to do a sub 17-second this year – I was setting that as my goal for 2020. I felt really calm on race day. I was confident I had trained as hard as I could and just went in with the attitude of going as fast as possible. Then I produced that! It was a massive, and very welcome, surprise. I’ve made so many changes this year to help me become a better athlete. I’m living in Chester now, I train with a new group and I’ve got a new chair. If the Worlds hadn’t gone well I would have been pretty gutted, having made all those changes and not seen any improvement. So it was a feeling of relief more than anything. 2018 was a really bad year and it made me question if I wanted to carry on competing. So I put everything into this year to see if I could still be the best in the world, and Dubai answered a lot of those questions for me! I felt ready to finish the season after the 100m. I’d built it up so much knowing that it was going to be the hardest race of the season. As soon as it finished I was exhausted. Then it was a long four days until the 800m, which felt more like two weeks. Watching everyone finish their competition, pack their chairs and equipment up, and having a bit of a Agilitymagazine | 2
