Wellesley athletes discuss off-season training routines

Being an athlete is no easy task at Wellesley. It means juggling classes with daily practices. It means getting up at 6 a.m. on weekends for away games. It sometimes means returning to campus early for preseason. None of this is worthwhile if Wellesley’s athletes don’t keep up with their training while they are away from campus. Runners Nicole Chui ’15 and Emma Kissane ’16, and soccer player Katherine Goldsmith ’16 sat down with The News to talk about how they stayed in shape during the summer.

“It’s important to maintain fitness levels every day,” said Chui, a three-season athlete who runs cross country and track. She and her teammates ran for about an hour a day during the summer to keep fit and get ready for the cross country season, which has just started.

“[The summer fitness program] involved running, weight-lifting, playing soccer, agility,” said Goldsmith, a goalkeeper on the soccer team, whose pre-season training began on Aug. 22. “I would go running long distance as much as I could. Long distance running is one of my weaknesses.  Many of us also found teams [we] could play with over the summer.”

Staying fit is just as important for sports whose seasons begin later. “Over the summer, we received a mileage chart for 6 to 8 weeks,” Kissane said. She is getting ready for the first indoor track meets in December. While she found it easy to allot the required amount of time to her summer training, she prefers to work with a coach to help her set goals for running. She is already working with Wellesley’s track coaches, and has started to incorporate weight lifting into her routine for the first time.

Despite summer training, it will be over two months before Kissane runs her first race for the Blue, so she must maintain her level of intensity while on campus. Finding the time to train on a daily basis while trying to get the most out of college is complicated, but Kissane is committed. “I’m anxious about getting back into the shape I was last year,” Kissane said. “We’ll soon be running seven to eight miles daily... I’m prepared to train every day.”

Chui placed 55th at the sub-varsity level in the Shriners Invitational at UMass-Dartmouth on Saturday, Sept. 15. She ran a 21:14.30 in the 5-kilometer event. Kissane will make her collegiate debut at the Northeastern Invitational on Saturday, Dec. 1.  Goldsmith made her collegiate debut at the Wellesley Invitational on Saturday, Sept. 8.