JOY’S OFF TO HER SWISS CAMP
Pinay Olympian to do high-elevation training in Switzerland for three weeks for SEAG
For the next three weeks, Olympian Mary Joy Tabal will be dealing with the high-intensity workouts at the St. Moritz in Switzerland, which serves as her peak training for the 29th Southeast Asian (Sea) Games.
The 27-year-old Cebuana will do high-elevation training at more than 5,000 feet at St. Moritz together with the elite runners of Tuscany Training Camp starting this Sunday.
St. Moritz is an eight-hour bus drive from the Tuscany Training Camp in Siena, Italy.
“We will be staying there for three weeks. This will be the peak of my training,” said Tabal, the country’s medal prospect for women’s marathon in the SEA Games on Aug. 19 to 30 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
The first Filipina marathoner to finish the Olympics will train abroad until the first week of August and she is hoping the intensive training will help her improve on her silver medal finish on her Sea Games debut last 2015 in Singapore.
Tabal said that all the focus now is on the training after she was reinstated to the national team and included in the Sea Games lineup just last week by the Philippine Athletics Track and Field Association (Patafa), the national sports association for athletics in the country.
Tabal had her first stint of training in Italy last May and her improvement showed when she won the half-marathon of the Scotiabank Ottawa Marathon in record-breaking fashion. She clocked 1 hour, 16 minutes and 27 seconds to eclipse the Philippine half-marathon record by more than two minutes.
The four-time reigning Milo Marathon champion earlier said that the toughest competitors in this year’s Sea Games would be the Olympians from Thailand, Jane Vongvorachoti and Natthaya Thanaronnawat, who is also the 2015 Sea Games gold medalist. /