Holly Manning is targeting a place in the 800m at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. Photo / Paul Taylor
Holly Manning is targeting a place in the 800m at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. Photo / Paul Taylor
Five months after arriving home from the hectic life of six years and athletics and university graduation in the United States, a former Napier Girls' High School pupil is about to take off again – hopefully with a landing at this year's Commonwealth Games in England.
It's a long flightand the runway, as it does for most home-based hopefuls this summer, starts at the Potts Classic in Hastings on January 22.
It'll finish on the other side of the World, pandemic-willing, at Birmingham where the Games will be held from July 28 to August 8.
Somewhere in between, 25-year-old Manning, a comparative late starter when her talent was spotted by PE teacher Sheila Smidt at high school 12 years ago, has more than a second or two to cut from her personal best for 800 metres, set in the US last May at 2 minutes 4.82 seconds running 6th in a heat of her regionals in Jacksonville, Florida.
Her current time ranks her No 1 New Zealander of those who ran last year, and 23rd of all time among the fastest New Zealand women over 800m – 0.74 sec behind 14th-placed late Hastings middle-distance runner Sylvia Potts, to whom the Hastings meeting was dedicated when it was first held 22 years ago.
Of likely opposition in the chance to compete at Birmingham, Canterbury runner Katherine Camp has a PB of 2:2.63 run on Wellington's Newtown Park two years ago, and 30-year-old Angela Petty, also of Canterbury, has a best of 1:59.06 set in 2018, which ranks her No 19 worldwide.
The national record is Toni Hodgkinson's 1min 58.25sec, set 25 years ago, the Commonwealth Games record is 1:57.35, run when the games were last held in England 20 years ago, and the world record is 1:53.88, run by Czech Jarmila Kratochvílová in 1983.
Times in the 2018 final on the Gold Coast in Australia ranged from the 1:56.68 of winner Caster Semenya, of South Africa, to the 2:03.08 of 8th-placed Eglay Nalyanya, of Kenya. Manning's best would have been good enough for 22nd in the Gold Coast heats.
No one's suggesting Manning will be a contender for a gold medal in Birmingham, but a place at the Games - and with a bit more luck a place in the final - are not out of range, and she is going for it.
The detail took quite some figuring, for she confesses to not being too great with remembering the dates, the times and the years.
"If you don't aim high you don't achieve anything. I'm not going to get anywhere without big goals," she said at Napier's Marewa Park, which she says has one of the best grass tracks.
She also rates the William Nelson athletics precinct track at Mitre 10 Regional Sports Park in Hastings, to where she's had to limit her track work and competition this season - unless harriers and running on the road – and where at the New Zealand Track and Field Championships, as one of her goals, she hopes to add the senior women's 800m title to the junior title she won in 2:09.76 at Newtown Park in 2015.
Holly Manning at Marewa Park in Napier this week. Photo / Paul Taylor
It was soon after that she headed on a scholarship to Stony Brook University, New York. Switching camps to the University of Delaware, in Newark, she returned home in August, worked as sports co-ordinator at Hastings GHS and is now, between training, working at Shoe Clinic in Napier.
Despite the pandemic minimising the opportunities, Manning is confident the training has her set for the-three night Classic series – Hastings on January 22, the famed Cook's Gardens (Whanganui) on January 30, and Wellington on February 4. The 4th "permit" meeting is in Auckland on March 23.
There is more to it than just the personal goals, for she's recently started on the committees pathway in the Hawke's Bay Gisborne athletics centre, steady as she goes but with a firm belief there are vast numbers of youngsters needing encouragement to get into athletics and to help realise the true New Zealand potential – as highlighted in the past by Lovelock, Snell, Walker etc.
"I think it is really important in this sport to develop a team of people," she says, having once thought her sports future was going to be in hockey, never dreaming she would take up running and be on the team at a campus in the US.
"As a team of people they can do way more," she says.
There is already a significant number of middle-distance hopefuls on the runway, with Potts Classic organiser Richard Potts expecting to see a fair bit of it.
Entries are expected to be bolstered with the presence of a New Zealand Secondary Schools team, put together as some outlet for the effort put in for the national schools championships which had to be cancelled last month.
"The 800m is really strong at the moment," Manning says, acknowledging some younger runners entering the calculations. "I'm really happy to be back in the moment."
