WSince the Tokyo Olympic Games were postponed to next year, the national championships in Braunschweig at the beginning of August had to be the highlight of the season for athletes. But when the sprint finals were about titles and medals, Lisa Mayer had to watch. Again, the 24-year-old runner slowed down muscular problems. Once again she was “in front of broken pieces,” as she says. “I knew it couldn’t go on like this.”
For three years, the semi-final participant has been fighting with her body over 200 meters at the Olympic Games in Rio 2016. It started with an injury to the flexor of the right thigh, followed a year later on the other side. In addition, there were always infections. The collaboration with a naturopath seemed to help, before the summer, the native of Giessen, who starts for the Wetzlar sprint team, thought she was in good shape. But in May she twisted her right foot in everyday life, and the story of suffering continued.
Not a painless step
“In the end,” says Lisa Mayer, “there is another broken season.” Only one “real competition”, in July in Wetzlar, she was able to complete fit and painlessly. Then there were setbacks like the one shortly afterwards in Regensburg when, two days after a “perfect final training session”, she couldn’t take a single painless step in the morning. “My body does not manage to heal relatively quickly,” said the sports soldier. In addition, her head is no longer free from negative thoughts. As soon as it tweaks somewhere, she goes into paralysis.
Lisa Mayer was looking for a way out of the vortex that keeps pulling her down. “Maybe the needle we’re looking for in the haystack doesn’t even exist,” she says. It is possible that the training system that led to new personal bests in the beginning of the national hurdle trainer Rüdiger Harksen no longer suits your body. The ambitious athlete decided to look for something new. In the week after the title fights, after intensive discussions with everyone involved, it was clear that the Frankfurt resident wanted to do her training laps with David Corell in the future. The federal junior coach already led Kevin Kranz and Michael Pohl to championship honors on the short distance, but is still part of the younger generation. Lisa Mayer sees advantages in this: “He’s still free to think and inquisitive,” she says.
The two have been working together for almost two weeks. She will not contest open-air competitions this year. Corell usually sends his athletes across the track at a meeting in December; The Olympic champion wants to make the best possible use of the phase up to the unusually early deployment with the relay. In the future, she will train in the block system: For four to six weeks at a time, a focus is set, first strength, then speed. The other areas are no longer trained intensively in parallel. In contrast to classic build-up training, this does not expose the body to so many different stimuli at once. Lisa Mayer hopes that her body will cope better with it.
She does not want to give up on researching the cause of her muscular impairments that appear in different places. This month she will be put through its paces for a few days in a diagnosis and rehabilitation center in Salzburg. The fact that Corell works with his athletes in their place of residence was “a nice side effect”, but was not decisive for the choice. Lisa Mayer, who previously trained in Mannheim, saves so much travel time. She postponed her master’s degree in communication to autumn 2021. “I don’t want to study on the side, as I did with my Bachelor’s degree,” she says. She likes to flatter about the time saved: She said to her friend, 800-meter runner Marc Reuther: “I can now start a sewing course.”
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