Julie Edmunds, Danny Knudson, Rozie Robinson, Matthew Ogle
and Jonathan Lord leave the starting line for the Otago
road race walk championships held in Fryatt St on Saturday.
Photo by Gerard O'Brien.
Timaru Boys' High School pupil Jonathan Lord confirmed
his rising status on the national race walking scene when he
won the Otago junior men's 5km title on Saturday.
Lord (16) won impressively in 23min 42sec, outpacing Otago
and national champion Rozie Robinson over the distance in the
multigraded field.
He follows in the footsteps of his older brother, Daniel, and
hopes to beat Daniel's national secondary schools 3km track
walk time (12min 50sec) in Dunedin in two weeks' time.
To gain bragging rights over his brother, Lord needs to
better his personal best over the distance by 23sec. An added
motivation for doing so is possible selection for the world
youth meeting in Sydney in January.
"I have to shine and impress the selectors," he said on
Saturday. "That record would help."
Daniel Lord represented New Zealand at the world cup in
Mexico and won a junior age-group title at the Pan Pacific
championships in Canberra.
Jonathan has three national junior titles and a silver medal
in the national junior men's 10km.
He trains six days a week, mixing speed and endurance.
Although outgunned over the first 5km by Lord, Robinson won a
third successive Otago 10km title, clocking 53min 22sec.
Robinson has dominated local and national women's competition
for the past three years.
Earlier this year, she recorded a personal-best time for 10km
of 49min 42sec at the Oceania championshipsin Cairns.
"I knew today wasn't going to be that fast," she said on
Saturday, pointing out she was concentrating on endurance
training at present. "It was a case of getting a race under
my belt to mix in a little bit of speed."
Robinson's next major competition will be a 3km event held in
association with the Lovelock Classic meeting in Timaru in
early January.
After that, she is targeting a time of about 1hr 40min at the
national 20km championships in March, to qualify for the
World University Games.
Matthew Ogle made it a threepeat in the boys 14 and under
section on Saturday.
Ogle (13), a year 9 pupil at Otago Boys' High School,
clinched the title over 2km in a personal-best time of 12min
3sec.
While he, too, may feature at the national secondary schools
championships in Dunedin, he is also targeting a third
consecutive Colgate Games title in Invercargill in January.
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