Evie Bartl winning bronze medal at Scottish Schools Championships

Evie Bartl achieved a bronze medal in the S1 combined event at the Scottish Schools  held at Grangemouth Stadium on 1st June 2013.  The combined event for S1 athletes includes a jump (high jump), a throw (shot put) and a speed endurance (600m). Evie had a fine competition at Grangemouth Stadium despite initial doubts about her starting at all as she hurt her hip this Tuesday while tripping over a hurdle at the East Ayrshire track & field championships. This meant that Evie missed a few last vital endurance sessions as she struggled to do any light running sessions after the incident. A shame as she had made good progress during the previous 4-5 weeks hitting her training target split times of below 40 seconds for the 200m/60 seconds for 300m  intervals consistently.

Her competition got off to a good start jumping a new PB of 1.39m in the high jump, which put her in third place after the first event and narrowly missing 1.42m (third best height of the day). Evie’s strongest event the shot put came next and Evie had two fine throws over the 9m mark and with her second throw of 9.74m close to her PB of 9.83m (2-3m further than her closest competitors). This gave Evie a comfortable lead of 119 points after finishing the two events.

All depended on the 600m race, knowing that every seconds counts, 1 second  translates to about 10 points. Her heat was very fast indeed with the first 200m split time of 35 seconds, which proved too much for Evie and she paid the price in the second half of the race loosing contact to the leading group. Her finishing time of 2.09 was a bit disappointing as it placed her 20 points behind the second placed athlete and 50 points behind the overall winner. In multi-event terms, Evie lost out of the silver medal by 3 seconds and about 5-6 seconds from the gold medal.

However, overall Evie can be pleased with the result having achieved a new PB in the high jump and throwing the shot for the second time  close to the magic 10 meter mark, a distance she has frequently achieved in her recent training sessions.