Inside Athletics

Despite being peak summer, there are still twelve weeks to go until the national championships, and as such there was little high quality athletics action over the weekend.

But for Lauren Boden's season debut run over 400m hurdles in Canberra, which yielded a promising Commonwealth Games B-qualifying run of 57.03 seconds, and Liz Parnov setting a new personal best and her fourth B-qualifier with a leap of 4.20m in Perth, the late January action was unusually subdued.

In NSW, the club championships competition took place in bizarre circumstances. Held at the warm up venue rather than the main track, competitors were faced with 40 degree heat which changed within an hour to a storm, with the temperature dropping close to twenty degrees. The strong headwinds, which by the time a wind gauge was set up, measured in excess of six metres per second on a number of occasions during the sprint events.

In those conditions a personal best run of 9:22.21 in the 3000m from Lara Tamsett, Olympian Lachlan Renshaw holding off James Gurr 1:49.24 to 1:49.84 in a negatively split 800m and a solo effort 2:07.39 effort from Sianne Toemoe in the B race of the women's race were the highlights. Yet, perhaps the most memorable occurance on a extraordinarily strange day of athletics was ACTs Gary Finegan becoming the first victim of the IAAFs new 'no false start' rule within NSW, and perhaps the first within Australia.

In WA, aside from Parnov's pole vault performance, Jody Henry recorded a solid 23.89 (+1.6 m/s) whilst Holly Noack ran 2:06.91 in a mixed 800m race. A visit from Tamsyn Lewis was the highlight of South Australia's interclub, with a tame 54.38 seconds 400m run.

In Victoria the leading performances of the AV shield competition was a 14.61m shot put from Kim Mulhall at Nunawading- the longest by an Australian this domestic season - and a 62.56m hammer throw by Gabrielle Neighbour at Frankston - the second longest throw this domestic season behind the 63.68m which Karyne Di Marco threw at Greystanes in NSW mid last week.

Competition in Queensland was centred around their multi event and relay championships, whilst Launceston hosted the Hammerfest competition. No results from either competition have been published.

Things are expected to heat up next weekend with the Australia Cup - the opening leg of the newly branded Australian Athletics Tour - yet the fields are weak compared to the last time Canberra hosted a high performance meet in 2008. The following week there will be much interest in the outcomes of the two clashing events, the Hunter Track Classic and the Brisbane Athletics Classic, before the focus shifts to the predominantly distance focused Briggs Classic in Hobart on Friday, 12 February.