Questioning her future on the track after a string of injuries, Anna Percy swapped hurdling for sprinting – with instant success. Now she’s ready for a showdown with New Zealand’s fastest woman, Zoe Hobbs.
It’s not often a track athlete switches events – dropping down the distance they run and doing it successfully.
In the case of rising Kiwi sprint star Anna Percy, the change from the 400m hurdles to the 100m sprint is an example of a young athlete able to express her physical gifts in the right event with the right environment to do so.
At a club meet in Christchurch in November, Percy became the third-fastest New Zealand woman ever – her time of 11.40s placing her just behind national record holder Zoe Hobbs (11.27s) and Michelle Seymour (11.32s), who’d previously held the record for 25 years.
“It’s crazy to think I’ve gone from just breaking 12 seconds to 11.40s in the space of 10 months,” says the 24-year-old Percy, who also recently graduated with a degree in engineering.
Starting athletics at age 15, Percy was initially a short hurdler (100m hurdles) and after a couple of years moved up to the longer 400m form.
She laughs and says she wasn’t fast enough back then to be a short hurdler. Having made the jump up to the tough 400m distance, Percy became the national junior record holder – a title she still holds.
But after four serious hamstring injuries, Percy was left questioning her future in athletics.
After a break, she decided to make the switch to sprinting at the 2021 national track and field championships – and finished fourth in the 100m final.
That result gave Percy and her long-time coach Andrew Maclennan validation of her potential as a sprinter.
In the 2021 off-season, Maclennan introduced a totally new training system for Percy and her training group – shifting away from conventional sprint training to focus on developing her spinal engine.
“Traditional speed training is about very up-and-down movements in the gym,” Percy explains. “We’ve moved away from that – doing more side-to-side movement instead of just the frontal plane.”
Percy says the spinal engine training has been a major breakthrough and is excited about so much progress with less than a year’s training under her belt.
With an unconventional, but research-based, approach, the results are paying dividends for Percy and her training partner, nationally-ranked sprinter Rosie Elliott. They both set huge personal bests to open the 2021/22 domestic season.
“My acceleration phase in the race is my strength. I feel like I’ve just got so much drive out of the blocks,” says Percy. Her strength metrics – like the Olympic lift, the clean – have gone up 15kg in a year.
Having Elliot as a training partner has been hugely beneficial, Percy says. As a 400m hurdler, she was often completing training sessions on her own, but now she has competition with every repetition they do.
“It’s hard turning up day-after-day completing all those nasty sessions,” she says. “It’s tiring at times by yourself.”
And it was frustrating. While the 100m is a more explosive event, Percy says the extension of the lead leg over the hurdle, combined with the rigorous training required for the 400m event, led to multiple injuries and led to her questioning whether to continue pursuing the sport.
In 2019, Percy represented New Zealand at the World University Games in Napoli, Italy, and by her own admission, she severely underperformed, with a disrupted build-up due to her ongoing hamstring related issues.
“It was a hard time – every athlete has hard times, but it’s how you respond to them,” she says.
Back in New Zealand, she took a few months off from the track to concentrate on finishing her engineering degree at the University of Canterbury (graduating last year with first-class honours in mechanical engineering), and to figure out if she wanted to continue in athletics.
“I was embarrassed of my performance at World Unis and I need to step back from the disappointment,” she says.
Growing up in Christchurch, Percy wasn’t the fastest kid at school, but played a lot of different sports and was most serious about trampolining. She trained as intensely as a 10 and 12-year-old as she does now, and then took up athletics for fun.
“I never had any success as a kid. I won a medal at the NZ secondary school nationals in my last year, but up until then it was pretty slow going,” the St Margaret’s College graduate says.
“It’s not about how fast you run when you’re 10 or 12, or even when you’re 20. At 24, I feel like I’ve finally found what works for me.”
Percy’s early season form is far from slow going. It’s not only a huge bonus for her personally, but helps create a strong bid for a 4x100m women’s relay team to qualify for the two major championships in 2022 – the world track and field championships in Oregon in July and the Commonwealth Games in August.
In their first hit-out of the year in Timaru, the team of Percy, Elliott, Hobbs and Auckland-based Georgia Hulls ran under the current national record time of 44.20s, but were disqualified because of a baton exchange outside the zone.
“It’s exciting having so many girls running as quickly as we are,” Percy says. “If we can get the baton round smoothly, we believe we can do the time we need.”
The team will come together for another crack at the relay on February 4 at the Capital Classic in Wellington – the Commonwealth Games qualifying standard for the 4x100m relay is 43.30s.
Individually, the sprinters will continue to push each other for places in the team, starting this weekend at the Potts Classic in Hastings. The hot Hawke’s Bay track with a gentle tail breeze typically produces excellent sprinting conditions.
It’s Hobbs who’s set the standard for the current group – the 2019 world championship representative took hold of the national 100m record outright in December last year.
“I have the utmost respect for Zoe,” Percy says. “It’s incredible what’s she done – not only for herself but for the women’s sprinting scene.”
Percy knows she still has a lot to learn to progress to the top speeds she believes she can run.
“When I ran 11.40s I was out there by myself, so I’ve got to learn to race other people,” she says.
Her ultimate dream is to run at the 2024 Paris Olympics, and she believes this is possible.
“I love the pursuit of how our bodies work and how we can make the most of it,” she says.
“There are so many different things you can do to improve, and it’s just finding the right one for you. That’s the exciting thing about it.”
