Winning two gold medals at the B.C. High School Track and Field Championships is pretty impressive, but doing so without having trained or practised at all for more than a month?
That takes talent.
Argyle’s Kristen Schulz was forced to strike a fine balance at the provincial meet held June 1-3 at Langley's McLeod Athletic Stadium where she pushed herself to jump farther than anyone else while also holding herself back so as not to do more damage to a partially torn Achilles tendon.
The Grade 11 student was a favourite coming into the season having already scored big results in previous years – she was gold in triple jump at youth age-group nationals two years ago and silver last year – but her 2017 season got off to a painful start at an April 22 meet where she banged her leg hard into a hurdle during a race.
“As soon as I hit it it got really swollen,” Schulz recalls. “I knew something was wrong, but I wasn’t sure if it was just a bruise that hurt, so I kept competing.”
Schulz finished the meet but when the swelling stayed she found herself bouncing through several medical centres before she was finally diagnosed with a partially torn Achilles. She was told to stay off it for the next six to eight weeks, meaning that heading into provincials she didn’t set foot on a track, instead working on rehab with a physiotherapist and hydrotherapy in a pool.
Provincials rolled around a little less than six weeks later, and though Schulz didn’t feel 100 per cent recovered, she desperately wanted to compete at the high school meet.
“Provincials is one of the big meets for me, so I really wanted to try to get a good jump,” she says. “I knew it wasn’t 100 per cent going into it, but I wanted to just risk it. I could feel it when I was competing, but it wasn’t bad enough for me to stop.”
Long jump was first on the program for Schulz, and at the start it was evident that she was rusty.
“It took me a long time to figure out my mark,” she says. “I had some faults. It wasn’t going super well.”
After the opening three rounds Schulz had pulled off just one successful jump but it was good enough to place her third overall, earning her three more attempts with the top eight jumpers.
By the last round Schulz had moved up to second place, one centimetre behind the leader.
With gold on the line, Schulz was down to her final leap and needed to decide how far she was willing to go on her tenuous tendon.
“I wanted to push it enough that I wanted to have a good jump, but I didn’t want it to rupture,” she says. “I was trying to watch it a little bit. If I felt it, I would stop.”
She ran, she jumped, she sailed and she landed. It didn’t feel like a monster jump, and the judge was having a close look at the plasticine fault line at the edge of the takeoff board. He finally signalled an OK jump, and the measurement came up: 5.49 metres, a championship jump by 15 cm and a new personal best.
“It felt really good to get that last jump,” says Schulz. “I was really excited.”
Two days later her heel was still slowing her down a little but she scored a fairly easy win in the triple jump, her No. 1 event. Her leap of 11.47 m wasn’t a personal best, but it was still more than 50 cm past the best jump of the silver medallist.
Schulz has been a high flyer since she started track and field in elementary school, beginning her club career with the Vancouver Olympic Club before moving over to the North Shore-based Norwesters Track and Field Club where she hooked up with well-regarded jumps coach Elena Voloshin. Schulz does triple jump, long jump and hurdles, and though she likes long jump the best – “I find it more fun – flying through the air” – triple jump became her specialty in Grade 9 when she made a game-changing technique switch.
“I always used to jump off my wrong leg in triple jump,” she says. “I was at provincials and I accidentally faulted – my setup was wrong – and I ended up just following through on the jump and it was a 10-m jump. Then I just kept it like that.”
This summer she’s got her sights set on the Canada Summer Games – she showed well at qualifying last weekend and will learn if she makes the team this week – as well as a return trip to the Legion National Youth Track and Field Championships. Beyond that, the 17-year-old is dreaming of representing Canada on the international stage.
“I really want to make a Canadian team,” she says, citing the Junior Pan Ams – a U20 meet, as a potential target down the road. “It would be really cool to have a Canadian jersey and get to compete for Canada.
