NAIROBI, Kenya, Jul 20 – The Kenyan team to the World Under 20 Championship will depart the country on Thursday next week for Cali, Colombia where the biennial competition will be staged.
The team has been in residential training at Moi Stadium, Kasarani for the past three weeks and Perpetua Mbutu says the sessions have been quite intense.
Mbutu, who led a group of 11 runners to a month-long training camp in Miramas, France in May, has been putting the sprinters through their paces.
“Yesterday they had intense training for speed endurance. So today (Wednesday) was a combination of active rest with the mechanism of running. Basically, it was about keeping your muscles active while preparing for tomorrow’s (Thursday) session, which will be once again intense,” Mbutu said.
“Tomorrow, the athletes will be pushing to maximum ferocity…to increase the recovery time and also to do longer distances,” she added.
Mbutu is optimistic the juniors will do well, especially in the sprints, considering they have grown in leaps and bounds since they commenced the residential camp.
“For the first week, it was quite a challenge for me because that was a week of getting to understand the athletes better. From Thursday last week until today, I can say their bodies are responding well and I believe we are going to do much better,” she said.
The lads have it all to do to match up to the feat of their predecessors who preserved the country’s crown as the kings and queens of World Under 20, having amassed 16 medals at the last edition of the competition in Nairobi in August last year.
Before that, Kenya had excelled at the 2018 championships in Tampere, Finland, collecting 11 medals to top the medal standings.
The juniors were visited at the camp on Wednesday by Athletics Kenya youth sub-committee chair Barnaba Korir who expressed his delight at the high spirits in the team.
“A quick chat with the juniors and their handlers drew a picture of a resilient group determined to defend our title when the biennial championships get underway early next month in Cali, Colombia,” Korir said.
The championships are slated for August 1-6 in the South American nation.
