Seven MU athletes set personal records at the season-opening regional track meet on Saturday, a haul the coaching staff called the best opening-day return in years — with the standout coming in the 1500 metres.
Junior Aisha Bello took nearly four seconds off her 1500m best, a breakthrough two seasons in the making after a plateau she described as “the most boring wall in the world.” Her coach traced the difference to a winter of unglamorous aerobic base work: “No secret sessions. Just months of the runs nobody posts about.”
The record board
- Aisha Bello — 1500m, −3.8 seconds
- Tom Keller — 800m, −1.9 seconds
- Sara Novak — 100m hurdles, −0.4 seconds
- Ben Osei — long jump, +19 centimetres
- Marta Silva — javelin, +2.1 metres
- Deniz Aydin — 400m, −1.2 seconds
- relay squad — 4x100m, −0.9 seconds
The relay record came with an asterisk of sorts — two of the four legs were run by athletes trying the event for the first time. “Which either means the record is soft or the ceiling is high,” said sprints coach Robert Lin. “We’re choosing to believe the second.”
The team’s next meet is in three weeks. Bello, now within striking distance of the school 1500m record set eleven years ago, was asked whether it is a target. “It wasn’t,” she said, “until Saturday.”
A base-work winter, by design
The team’s strong opening was engineered, distance coach Amelia Fox insists, in the least exciting way possible: the whole squad spent winter on aerobic base mileage and general strength, with no time trials at all before March. “Athletes hate it. Every one of them wants to test fitness in January. But every January test costs a February of recovery, and the season doesn’t care what you ran in January.” Saturday’s seven records, she argued, are the winter’s invoice being paid — “with interest still owed.”
The meet also marked the debut of the team’s new self-timing crew — four students trained on the electronic timing equipment, replacing the previous dependence on borrowed officials. Their times matched the meet’s official results to the hundredth throughout the day, a reliability that means MU can now host time trials on its own track between meets, something the coaches have wanted for years.
