The first four athletes to represent the Cochrane Endurance Project at the Canadian National Track and Field Championships made a name for themselves with some personal best times, thanks to some tough mental preparation.
Jessica Kaiser, Courtney Brohart, Jacob White, and Holly Moores became the first-ever athletes to represent Cochrane’s new club at the Athletics Canada's national championships, hosted by Langley, B.C., June 22 to 26.
Coach Travis Cummings attributes their somewhat surprising early success to concentrating on the mental preparations he thinks are key to elite performance.
“We’ve been really working on the psychological side of things, how to get a good mental game plan,” he said.
“In order to get into a state of flow in a competition like that, you have to be totally present in the moment – it’s a hard thing to do.”
Jessica Kaiser beat her previous personal best in the senior women's 1,500-metre (m), running a 4:34.94 and barely missed advancing to the semifinals.
Unfortunately, she narrowly missed out on the semi-finals by 0.6 hundredths of a second. But she said that hardly put a damper on the experience.
“I’m ecstatic,” she said. “It was a lot of hard work that pulled together, and I was really excited – it’s more than I thought I could do.”
Kaiser agreed with Cummings that the mental side of preparation is definitely what contributed to her success, and that her coach put together a flawless program for her.
“It’s working on believing in myself. So in the morning I was nervous, but when I got to the start line I was calm and I had a plan in my mind. I felt like I executed it like I wanted, so a whole bunch of things came together,” she said.
“I was on cloud nine – it was awesome.”
In the U20 women's 1,500-m, Cochrane Endurance Project’s Holly Moores surpassed her previous best time in qualifying for the semi-finals, where she again improved upon her time.
She smashed her previous personal best of 5:16 by more than 11 seconds with a 5:04.90 finish in the seeding round, and then again dropped it to 5:03.97 in the semis.
“Holly knocked 13 seconds off her 1,500-m. She made the semis at the nationals, which was really unexpected, so it was a nice surprise,” Cummings said.
Moores has competed for both Cochrane Endurance Project and St. Timothy High School, and will be running for Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) starting this fall.
Jacob White recorded a new personal best of 4:17.59 in the U20 men's 1,500-m and followed that up by cutting more than three seconds from his personal best in the two-lap event with a time of 2:01.64 in the 800-m.
Courtney Brohart recorded her second-best time in the 5,000-m thanks to a time of 17:10.43.
The Cochrane Endurance Project is a private track club formed a few years ago, with participants mostly coming from Cochrane-area high schools.
Cummings teaches at St. Timothy high school and is a certified high performance track coach.
