All posts tagged: sprints

‘Camp mode: Dead’ — Eye on World Cup qualification, India’s men’s hockey team turns to sprints, mountain runs to improve endurance | Hockey News

‘Camp mode: Dead’ — Eye on World Cup qualification, India’s men’s hockey team turns to sprints, mountain runs to improve endurance | Hockey News

By their own admission, Craig Fulton has made his players do ‘crazy’ things. They’ve climbed Table Mountain and rappelled in the Swiss Alps. Yet, when they returned to the team’s base in Bengaluru late April, the back-to-back Olympic medallists were already ‘questioning’ their ‘life choices’. Sharpening skills and learning new tactics weren’t the only items on the to-do list of the 55 players, now pruned to 40, who reported for the national camp. What awaited them were 400m sprints, middle-distance runs, mile-long endurance drills, galloping down the hills and intense gym workouts. On top of all that were routine — and unrelenting — turf sessions, rehearsing penalty corners (attack and defence) and shooting skills. “Camp mode: Dead,” vice-captain Hardik Singh wrote, in jest, on his social media page, after just the second day of the camp. Story continues below this ad Scroll down the timeline of any player, and all one sees is him on the running track, on mountain slopes, or at the gym. “This is the most intense training block we have had …

Animesh Kujur, the new kid on the starting blocks, aiming to break records in sprints | Sport-others News

Sprinter Animesh Kujur, on a lark, approached a foreign coach at last year’s Under-23 meet in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, and asked to be taken under his wings. As luck would have it, Englishman Martin Owens was open to the idea. Owens, the head coach of the Odisha Reliance Foundation Athletics HPC, asked Kujur to first appear for selection trials. “I asked him if he even knew who I was and he said ‘no’. Then introduced myself and told him that he would have to undergo trials at the high-performance centre (HPC) in Odisha,” Owens recalled. This was a turning point for Kujur. Kujur, 20, has scorched the track by clocking an impressive 20.62 seconds to win the 200 metres gold at the Federation Cup in Bhubaneshwar, the second-best time ever by an Indian after Amalan Borgohain’s 20.52, the national record. He also qualified for the 100 metre final, making him the sprinter to watch out for. The Kujur-Owens partnership has started showing results. “I had no idea who he was. I just saw that a foreigner …