About to close the year, still with great goals ahead of her, Carolina Robles will shelve the best season of her life . And he wants more. The fifteen have almost gone from running to levitating . Adversity, injuries and the desire for self-improvement made her stronger until she became an all-terrain athlete brimming with confidence and sure, in her sporting maturity, that the best is yet to come .
“Hopefully this 2021 will not end. It has been the best year of my life. On the indoor track, outdoors in the 3,000 obstacles, the Tokyo Games… It’s what it sounded like when I started running at the age of seven”, explains the Sevillian, who in her desire to pursue that challenge of being in the Olympic event was signing personal records: on the indoor track, under nine minutes (8.59.93), achieving the eighth Spanish mark of all time; In the 3,000 obstacles she found her proof of her. She smashed her personal best with a 9.34.87 and her results took her to Tokyo, “the best experience” of her life. “I enjoyed it a lot. Every moment was special . The races, the warm-up seeing the people around me, the Olympic village, the trip… I tried to enjoy every moment, because I was fulfilling my dream.”
He fell in the semifinals and was picked up to run an entire Olympic final: “Even with the pain with which I finished the test, I enjoyed it.Enjoy that semifinal and the final. I ran in pain, but I can say that I was in the Olympic final . It will be an indelible memory. The silences, the nerves. They are still very vivid sensations”.
“Now I realize how crazy it was to train on the street avoiding people”
And how do you explain this change
“I always saw myself with more quality than the one I later reflected on the track. I changed coach and with Antonio Serrano (since November 2019) we realized that the programming was not efficient. Now everything is better. Rolled. And the truth is that I still have a lot of progression and margin”, points out the athlete from Montequinto . And she adds:“Now I understand how crazy it was to train on the street. It’s something I miss, but I didn’t get anywhere that way . I couldn’t do series dodging people, with steps, on the field…”.
And now he is focused on the field. In the cross country, where she is being the most outstanding Spanish woman in the cross season. If her first cap was at the Olympic Games, the second now comes at the Dublin European cross country , which will be held on December 12. “I recovered well from the fall, I was out for a while and it seems that starting the preparation for the cross country later has been good for me.” “The only goal I have in the European Championship is to reach the goal squeezed. My coach sees options to be in the top 15 and if he trusts me so much, I can’t be less, despite the fact that there will be two or three nationalized Africans. I am inexperienced in the cross, but I go with the security of giving everything”, she indicated.
The change in the work routine has not been the only thing to which she attributes her improvement. “I became an ovo-vegetarian. Stop eating meat, fish and dairy products. I feel my body with more energy and I recover very well.Even the analytics are better. That and Antonio Serrano’s guide have allowed me to take the leap I’ve been waiting for a long time”, explains Robles, who is preparing to be in the 3,000 obstacles in 9.20 or 9.25. “Now I feel very good. I run enjoying the cross a lot once I let go of the tension of qualifying for the Games. Fulfilling that dream, I run enjoying myself. I feel like training, I do it in a relaxed way and that is transmitted to the competition”.
After the continental event, the following challenges are already set: “The National Cross Country, in Jaen, in January” and then there is the European and World Championships in the summer “You don’t have to choose, but you do have to aim for one of the events to get to peak form. My idea is to go to the European Championship” , highlights the Sevillian, who in the maelstrom of high competition still finds time, “wherever she can”, for her Correcaminos Athletics School and her De Ella Life Running club. “I’m at a point where I’ve picked up a good dynamic and I don’t spend the time I used to, but I really enjoy training my athletes,” I assure you.
