Scotland’s Laura Muir is perhaps one of the most exciting athletes to watch race at the moment and her recent double gold (1500m & 3,000m) at the 2019 European Indoor Championships in Glasgow show cased what an awesome athlete she is developing into.
The 3,000mtrs race started with relatively benign opening laps – I thought for a while my pb of 8:37 was going to be safe – a virtual ‘chicking’ to coin a triathlon phrase, was not looking likely. But with
Konstanze Klosterhalfen (GER) picking up the pace the race was on dropping in a 33 second lap and half way was reached in 4:25, before further acceleration by Muir surging into a commanding lead sealed the race with a 4:05 second half. Klosterhalfen was also inside my 8:37 – so double chicked. Ho hum, the other adage that the older I get the better I was also seems not to be standing up to the test. Let’s not forget Laura Muir also ran a 1,500m heat 90 minutes before in 4:09. She finished the weekend off with a similarly dominant win in the 1,500mtrs and was naturally lauded all around. (See Athletics Weekly report.)
Before the event there had been some reaction to her British indoor mile record in Birmingham (16th Feb 2019) suggesting that perhaps her performance would be called into question because of the spikes she was wearing infringing the rules of not being generally available. See The Daily Mail and others.
It prompted me to get all nostalgic about my all time favourite spikes, also made by Muir’s own kit sponsor Nike – the Nike Zoom Distance. Mine are 1983 vintage which was probably a year or so after they came out. So light at 290 grams for the pair, they fitted like a sock and I thought they were the coolest track spikes money could buy. I also thought the same about my first pair of Nikes – a 1979 pair of Nylon Cortez in blue with a yellow swoosh.
Nike Zoom Distance 1983
