The start of the indoor track season brings a lot of promise and hope. Promise that the previous months of training and prep work will result in a string of personal bests.
Hope that those bests will be accompanied by rewards of NCAA and national qualifying times.
For Trinity Western University athletes Jennifer Shannon and Ben Tjernagel, the promise came together at last week’s University of Washington Preview meet. The other rewards may be on the horizon.
Shannon, a Burnaby South alumna in her third season with the Spartans, posted a PR in her 800m event, finishing the race in 2:17.98. It put her 14th overall.
Tjernagel, 19, achieved a new personal best in the 60-metre dash, placing 19th with a time of 6.99 seconds. It clipped a slice off his time of 7.01 seconds, set a day earlier in the qualifying race, where he stood 12th overall.
The New Westminster native is a second-year student-athlete at Trinity Western.
Both the program’s men's and women's track and field teams enjoyed impressive debuts for the 2019 season, as the Spartans put together a variety of strong showings including several personal records at the Seattle competition.
"Opening day was great. It was a wonderful way to open the season for a number of reasons,” remarked Trinity Western coach Shane Wiebe. “I thought we really executed a lot of the things we've been working on to this point and a lot of our athletes did well in that department. And right out of the gate, we had some great personal bests, so I'm overjoyed. The competition was great and it was a really good test for us. I think our coaches were pretty pleased all around for our first meet of the year."
The Simon Fraser University track and field team also got things going in a big way, with three athletes finishing under the provisional NCAA qualifying standard.
Both junior Rowan Doherty (8:12.35, 18th overall) and senior Carlos Vargas (8:22.33) reached the provisional marks in the 3000m race with personal bests. On the women's side Sophie Dodd achieved the standard with her 2:13.86 time in the 800m, good for 11th.
Doherty's time, which saw him cut his previous best by nine seconds, earned him the Great Northwest Athletic Conference's Men's Track Athlete of the Week honour. His time was the best result of all Div. 2 runners in the event, and stands as the third-quickest time this season.
The SFU women's 4x100m relay team of Nicole Lindsay, Addy Townsend, Renate Bluschke and Dodd were just shy of breaching the provisional mark with a fourth-place time of 3:53.63.
Burnaby Central alumni Nathan Mah posted strong results in both the 60m (7.04) and 200m (22.50) races.
