Tyra Gittens goes into tomorrow’s SEC Championships in a confident mood seeing how well she has performed indoors this season.
Heading into the championships set for the Randall Tyson Indoor Track Centre, the 22-year-old Trinidadian, a Red Shirt Junior at Texas A&M, is the defending champion and perhaps favourite to win yet another pentathlon title.
So far this season, she has uncorked personal bests in three of the five disciplines – the high jump, long jump and 60m hurdles (8.34) - and is looking to follow up on her personal best score of 4612 points set at the Texas Tech Invitational in late January.
That score is the third-best collegiate performer score all-time and bettered her Texas A&M school record by 221 points.
“My season has definitely a good start to the new year I am not surprised at my performance. I have been working very hard over the summer. I have changed the way I trained, changed my mindset towards everything, including my training and I think that has created a great foundation for my season so far and the season I want to have in the future,” she told Sportsmax.TV on the eve of competition that runs from tomorrow until Friday.
“My PB in the high jump (1.91m) was definitely exciting. I love the pentathlon so I tend to do better. It’s a more relaxed environment so to be able to jump that in a pentathlon was definitely awesome.
“I have also done pretty well in the long jump; 6.62 is my PB and its definitely motivating. I feel this is just a really good start and this is just me transferring everything that I’ve learned and everything that I do in practice to competition. The only thing that changes is the people I competed against but my mentality towards everything is the same.”
Come tomorrow she has hopes of delivering another personal-best performance, one that will reflect the work she has been putting in in training.
“The shot put has also been going well training-wise but I have yet to show that in the competition so I am excited for tomorrow to get a big throw in there,” she said.