Michelle Harrison’s mother was so sure her daughter would qualify for the 2022 World Athletics Championships that she bought tickets to the event last year.
But the younger Harrison didn’t receive confirmation of her place on Team Canada until last month, just days after she twice ran under the World Athletics qualifying time for the women’s 100m hurdles.
“I’ve been working towards these numbers for so long,” the Saskatoon athlete says. “To have finally achieved them, it felt really good.” As for Harrison’s mother? “She’s really excited.”
Harrison, 29, started her competitive track career in high school with the Saskatoon Track and Field Club and has been training full-time in Saskatoon since graduating from the University of Saskatchewan with a Bachelor of Arts and Science degree in 2020. She’s been chasing the 12.84-second standard in the 100m hurdles for years and finally hit it not once, but twice, at the Royal City Inferno Track & Field Festival in Guelph, Ont. in early June running 12.80s and 12.83s in the heats and finals.
For all the work that went into it, the first time she broke the 12.84-s barrier was anticlimactic because the time board at the track malfunctioned. Harrison didn’t learn how fast she’d run until 45 minutes after crossing the finish line.
“I was really relieved once I actually found out my time. But it wasn’t that exciting moment … it was so long until I found out that it just lessened the excitement a little bit,” she said.
Less than three weeks later, Harrison went on to win the 100m hurdles at the Canadian Track and Field Championships in 12.99s despite a headwind.
Harrison credits her recent success to consistent training. “I’ve had so many ups and downs throughout my career and now I’ve got in a solid block of training with no setbacks,” she says.
Those setbacks include falling out of love with track and field in her early 20s after suffering from Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S), which occurs when a person doesn’t consume enough calories relative to the amount of training being done. Harrison took a break from the sport and then began training under coach Jason Reindl when she started her undergraduate degree at the University of Saskatchewan in 2017. Just as things started to click, COVID-19 made it impossible to train and compete. Then, as the world slowly opened up in late 2020, she tore some ligaments in her ankle. In early 2021, she suffered nerve damage in her arm after routine bloodwork.
While things didn’t fall into place before last summer’s Tokyo Olympics, Harrison now seems to be on a roll. She was named to her first senior national team earlier this year for the World Athletics Indoor Championships in Belgrade, Serbia where she made the semi finals in the 60m hurdles. This outdoor season she’s so far clocked eight sub-13s performances in the 100m hurdles and added three more senior national teams to her resume: She’ll represent Canada at the World Championships in Eugene (July 15-24), the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, England (July 28 to Aug. 8) and NACAC (the North American, Central American and Caribbean Championships) in Freeport, Bahamas (Aug. 19-21).
For the two weeks leading up to those events, Harrison plans to take it as easy as possible. After that, she’s looking forward to competing in Eugene in front of her mother and husband and hopes she may be able to make the semis – and maybe even the finals.
“I’m kind of excited for two down weeks before Worlds because I have been competing quite a bit,” she said in early July after running 12.90s at the Pre World Championships Invitational in Edmonton. “I’m going to just keep on doing what I’m doing, not really changing anything at this point. What I’m doing is working so I don’t want to change too many things.”
CBC Sports will be offering live streams of the World Championships beginning July 15. The women’s 100m hurdle heats begin Sat. July 23 at 12:20 p.m. CST.
