Versatile distance runner Sudha Singh is focussed at this month’s National Inter-State Athletics Championships to crack the Olympic Games’ qualification mark of girls’s 3000 meters steeplechase. “The Inter-State meet will probably be my final likelihood to qualify for the Tokyo Olympic Games. I’m hopeful of profitable a ticket to Tokyo earlier than the June 29 deadline to attain the qualification time,” Olympian Sudha told IANS on Sunday. The Olympic qualification mark is 9 minutes 30 seconds. The National Inter-State Athletics Championships is scheduled to be held from June 25 in Patiala.
Sudha, 33, said that the steeplechase qualification time is within her reach. “I’ve been training and racing for a steeplechase event since 2010. Therefore, I’m confident of achieving my goal of running under the qualification mark at the Inter-State competition in Patiala,” she stated from Bengaluru, the place she is coaching.
Initially, Sudha’s focus was to earn Olympic qualification time in the ladies’s marathon. But she wasn’t profitable in cracking the marathon qualification mark of two hours 29 minutes 30 seconds in February on the National Marathon held in New Delhi.
“I had deliberate to run one other marathon race in Europe, however the Covid pandemic disaster in India spoiled my possibilities. Since the deadline of May 31 to qualify for the marathon is over, the main focus now could be to attain an excellent consequence in the steeplechase occasion,” said the 2018 Jakarta Asian Games 3000m steeplechase silver medallist.
In March, the Uttar Pradesh athlete had skipped the Federation Cup, an Olympic qualification event, as she was still recovering from the marathon she had run the previous month. Moreover, Sudha was hopeful of getting a chance to compete in her second marathon in May.
“It takes more than a month to recover from a marathon race. Since my target was to compete in another marathon race in May, I wasn’t concentrating much on track workouts,” stated the Arjuna award winner.
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