Elliott eyes 43-year-old record
Less than a year into her 400m career, Canterbury runner Rosie Elliott has her sights set on breaking New Zealand’s longest standing women’s national record.
Elliott, 25, only took up athletics four years ago and spent one of those years out with an injury.
Initially a sprinter, after winning her first national title last year she was selected for the World Championships in Oregon and her plan is to get back to those Championships again this year. She ran a personal best 400m time of 52.16 seconds at last weekend’s Cooks Classic in Whanganui.
Elliott needs to ranked in the world’s top 30 or reach the automatic qualifying time of 51.00s to qualify for the World Championships in Budapest in August.
“It has been a whirlwind, I wasn”t aiming to qualify for the World Championships (in 2022) it just sort of happened and so it’s taken a pretty big mental shift.”
She will have to better 51.6 seconds to break Kim Robertson’s 1980 national record. However, she feels it’s realistic. “My time last weekend was just over half a second off the national record, which considering it was also a half a second PB is encouraging.”
Elliott is hoping to lower her time to the mid 51s in her next outing and then have a crack at the record and the World Championship qualifying time in Australia later this summer.
She is switching things up this week, running the 200m and competing in the high jump at the Capital Classic in Wellington on Friday night.
Also competing are sprinter Georgia Hulls, para-sprinter Anna Grimaldi, javelin thrower Tori Peeters and Rebekah Greene, who brokea 40 year old mile residents record last weekend.