The Mastering Podcast

Mastering Speed: Unpacking Elite Sprint Performance with Reece Holder & Dr. Christopher Dale | Part Two

• The Mastering Team • Season 1 • Episode 14

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Ever wondered what it takes to transform an athlete into a world-class performer? In this fascinating second part of our deep dive into mastering speed, our hosts Don Sanka Small and Will Tuffley uncover the revolutionary training methods behind Rhys Holder's emergence as one of Australia's fastest 400m runners ever.

Dr Christopher Dell takes us behind the curtain of his cutting-edge training environment, where traditional approaches have been replaced by sophisticated measurement systems that precisely quantify athletic performance. From the Norwegian-engineered Muscle Lab system to American pneumatic resistance equipment from Kaiser, these tools aren't just fancy gadgets—they're reshaping how elite athletes train and perform.

The results speak for themselves. Rhys recently clocked the fastest split ever by an Australian in the 4x400m relay at World Relays, an eye-popping 43-second performance that ranks among the top 25 splits globally in history. Even more impressively, after just three months with Chris's specialised equipment, Rhys' power output has skyrocketed from 3,000 watts to 4,500 watts, a trajectory that suggests extraordinary potential ahead.

Beyond the track, we explore the challenging realities facing elite athletes in Australia. Despite his world-class performances, Rhys still works 30-35 hours weekly while balancing training and competition. Without employer support covering thousands in travel expenses, competing internationally would be financially impossible, raising important questions about how we develop and support our sporting talent.

Whether you're a sports science enthusiast, a coach looking to innovate, or simply curious about what happens at the cutting edge of human performance, this episode offers rare insight into the technological revolution transforming athletics. Subscribe now to join the conversation about the future of sport and high performance.

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Don:

Dude, you ran a 43-second split, one of the fastest splits ever. That was the fastest split in that event.

Reece:

Fastest split, in that event, fastest Australian split ever. I think it was 25th fastest split ever in a 400.

Chris:

Now a lot of the things that I might measure in the gym from an athletics perspective or a sprinting perspective. There's a little bit of crossover with weightlifting. We're still trying to develop power. You know, accelerating an object Rhys is accelerating himself, but in weightlifting we're moving a bar trying to get it overhead. In swimming we're still trying to move forward, but you're moving through a body of water.

Don:

Welcome to Mastering. We are back with Dr Christopher Dell and Rhys Holder, the second fastest Australian to run 400 meters. We started having a good chat about a bit of Rhys' start in track and field and the role that Chris has been playing in helping him get to the Olympics in 2024. But what we want to tap into today is to understand the methodologies and some of the new age techniques that Chris has been deploying with not just Reeves but with his squad. Joining me is one of my favorite co-hosts, will Tuffley. Will runs the sports division at BDO. He's got invaluable insight that he can bring to this. And also, will, you're part of the Aussie Athletes.

Will:

Fund.

Don:

Aussie Athletes Fund. Yeah, so that'll be also really good to have a chat, because we started talking to Reece about, you know, sponsorships and how they get the financial support as athletes. I think Reece was talking about the fact that he's still got to work, go to uni and then still, you know, fund his way around the world, so we might start with that before we go into the training. Mate, what support do athletes have these days when it comes to you know?

Will:

especially for track and field, where they don't have that many eyeballs. Yeah, so the Aussie Athlete Fund has basically come out of a bit of a passion from Nat Cook five-time Olympian and basically had a bucket load of debt after being basically at the top level of her game and I suppose what she wants to create is an opportunity for all young athletes to come through and not be in the same situation that she was, and so that's where it's been born from. So, yeah, I'm one of the directors, along with a few others, and that's effectively what we're trying to do. We want to break the barrier, we want to make it easier for people to become Olympians and not have that financial burden and stress that comes with that. So, yeah, and people like Reece are exactly the type of people we're trying to support and part of BDO.

Don:

That's also your remit. You look after athletes as well, right yeah.

Will:

So one of the things I look after as part of our sports division is education to athletes around tax, finance, accounting, professional development and sort of helping with the I don't like to call it transition, but sort of the repurpose as you finish sport. So that's one of the things we're doing and building as part of BDO Sports Division.

Don:

But can I ask quickly at what point does an athlete need to think about transition?

Will:

I think they need to start from the start. I think it's from very early.

Will:

I think the opportunities you get in sport in terms of network, I think the skill sets that you get as an athlete are probably underestimated a lot of the time. I think we don't educate athletes enough on how good their skill sets are when they repurpose themselves in the business world. So I think as soon as you get into sport you know it should be something that should be on your mind. How can you utilize sport and get the most out of it? So whatever you do next, you're going to do it at your full potential.

Don:

Rhys at 22,. You know you're at the top of the game. You're, you know, about to break the 400 meter record. Do you think about transition?

Reece:

Yes, which is why I'm currently studying and have a part-time job. I'm starting to be a construction manager, as you mentioned, to reposition. But yeah, that's what I've thought about for life after track. So I don't start from base level, pretty much finishing high school.

Don:

Good on you, man. And you said you work. Um, you said you train and then you go to work. Is that a full-time job?

Reece:

uh, it's over, it's over. It's anywhere from like 30 to 35 hours a week at the moment, um, and then work helps when I, when I travel away. Um, but my role is just like a junior junior ca in there for a big, uh construction company. Do you want to give them a?

Don:

plug. Shout out McNabb, Nice work. Any company that's helping athletes, they're going to get the credit 100%, and I think Rishi tapped into it.

Will:

I think we talk about flexible working these days for the full-time worker, but I think businesses being able to be flexible with athletes and working around timetables and that could be anything from a vacation, a program, all the way through to full-time employment the more we can do for people with flexibility timetables when they're trying to achieve something outside of I'd say, out of their work, I think that's an awesome thing to be able to do so, Rhys.

Don:

when it comes to funding, obviously it's amazing that McNab's obviously paying you a salary. They're giving you the flexibility. Does that cover everything, or do you need to raise more funds?

Reece:

So last year I was actually lucky enough with McNab. They covered all my accommodation travel for pre-Olympic Games, which was huge to me because that was about $12,000 or $13,000. But without that definitely would have struggled and probably wiped my bank account clean.

Don:

So, yeah, that's crazy for a 22-year-old to have that kind of. Are there any other avenues? I actually found, when I was looking around, aussie Athlete Fund. We found out about them on our first episode. I've never even heard of them before. You had a page there.

Will:

Australian Sports Foundation. Oh, sorry page there. Australian Sports Foundation oh sorry, yeah. Australian Sports Foundation. Yeah, that was with Raleigh and with Cedric Yep.

Don:

Yeah, that was a bit of an eye-opener. I didn't even know that anything like that existed. You've got a page on there too.

Reece:

Yes, I do have a page on there. I probably haven't been keeping mind of the bargain as much as everyone else. Well, I mean as much as you meant to. What do you have to do, dave? Just help and promote with businesses. But yeah, I just feel like I probably haven't done as much as what I have needed to Mate, you're doing enough.

Don:

I was going to say this is the problem, right, like there's got to be a better way for um athletes that are they're trying to study, doing everything else and trying to raise funds that should be the last thing on their mind to go and represent their country. I think that's a problem, and it's a problem that you guys can probably find a solution for.

Will:

But let's start talking about some fun stuff well, I mean, in a weird sort of way it's probably a good segue to Chris Like, as a coach, like you're obviously handling a lot of that, dealing with the athlete, like what control do you have, I suppose, over how much you can push them to outside of? Like you obviously want them on the track as much as you can, getting the most out of them. So how much, from your perspective, do you guys have either control of that or do you see the benefit of doing this stuff on the outside and helping them expand their outside of sport ventures?

Chris:

I think track and field at the elite level, particularly with athletes from Australia. The elite season is in the northern hemisphere in our winter. So to be competitive at the level that athletes like Rhys are, they have to travel to Europe to compete. That is a fact. You just have to, and access to high-level competitions is imperative in getting high-level performance at what we call benchmark events, so your world championships and your Olympic Games what we call benchmark events, so your world championships and your Olympic games.

Chris:

If you don't have access to those competitions to either qualify or to get you ready for the benchmark event, you simply will not perform at a level where you can be competitive From athletes here. You need money to do it. So, yes, I want my guys to train as much and as hard as we can, but if we don't have the financial backing whether that's through foundations like what you're involved in, or individual sponsors or even just working part-time, like Reece does those competition opportunities just won't materialise. So then, if I'm restricting access to those things from a coaching perspective or a coaching environment, I'm actually shortchanging my own coaching program because we're just not going to make it. We're not going to compete when we need to, so we're not going to get the performance that we probably could with our athletes or that we want to get in the season.

Don:

So, Europe's not around the corner. So to get there, it's a 20-, 30-, 40-hour journey, depending on. So to get there, it's a you know, 20, 30, 40 hour journey, depending on how you get there. You're not going to just go and train or compete and come back. You're going to be going for a at least month, two or three.

Reece:

Yeah, so last last year I was over in europe about two months including olympic games, probably a little bit over two months, um and crunch. I had to pay. Well, I didn't. I was fortunate enough not to pay for everything. Mcnab paid for everything right until we got into pre camp for the olympics. So it's a. It's a fair, fair chunk of change, like 12 grand for myself with all my meats um accommodation. So you have to base somewhere for for most of your time, because meats only pay for your accommodation for two, maybe three nights of the comp.

Don:

So you gotta pay for everything else. Yeah, the other part of this is you've got to keep training and you're away from your training squad and that environment as a coach. How hard is that for you? Because you know we're gonna tap into the way you coach, which is very different to what other coaches or to recreate that environment for three months while your elite squad is in Europe. How do you manage that?

Chris:

It's a big headache. In short, it's a huge headache because in athletics and in sort of like the coaching system, there's coaches who are employed by our national federation I'm not one of those and there's coaches that aren't. A lot of the time those coaches have funding available to them to go to Europe for prolonged periods of time. Now, last year is different to this year because of where the benchmark event was. So last year it was the Olympic Games, which was in Europe, which meant that athletes had to stay there for longer. This year, world champs are in Tokyo in September.

Chris:

So the structure of that European season is now very different because you're not looking at such a long trip overseas. You can get away with sort of what we're planning on doing, which is only maybe a month, maybe three, four weeks get a couple of races in, come back home, do all the rest of your tuning up and training and then jumping into Tokyo, which you can't do when the main event is in Europe. I am probably a little bit different as well in terms of how I train my athletes because of the sports technology that I have available to me. So I'm very fortunate that we have a very high-tech, high-performance setup with a muscle lab system. We've just taken delivery a few months ago of some Kaiser strength and conditioning equipment, which you know that. You know that's pretty rare in Australia and you know there is some of that in Europe, but there's not that many.

Chris:

So the way that we train we heavily lean on the technology and the equipment that we've got, so if we're looking at prolonged periods of time away from it, it impacts what we could maybe do. The other thing is because I, you know, I run, I'm still, I'm self-employed effectively with my allied health and my coaching roles is that when I'm traveling, if I travel overseas with these athletes, I'm then away from my primary source of income. It becomes very, very difficult for me to be able to break away from the ties with business I've got here to support my athletes. So last year I actually didn't travel to Europe at all and everything was done through WhatsApp between Reece and Ebony while they were on the build-up to the biggest meet of their life, which is just very, very hard.

Don:

Mate, that's ridiculous.

Will:

You touched on an interesting point there. So there's obviously coaches under the national body and then there's coaches that sit out One Reece, like how do you decide from your perspective, like whether you want to be under a coach? Are you encouraged to go under an Australian coach who's under a national system? So that's sort of like one question I've got, and the other one to you, chris, is is there a way we need to change the structure in that Like should all coaches sort of be, you know, a personal contract?

Don:

What's the benchmark?

Will:

Yeah, how do we structure that better?

Don:

If you look at yours, if you look at potential of your squad, if you look at the potential of the athletes you've already got, if you look at the results from the you know World Relay Championships, yeah, it's obvious to me that the money should be going.

Chris:

It's a very loaded question.

Will:

We don't want you to get into any trouble.

Chris:

No, no and there's a lot of different answers that you could have, and I think that I don't think that it's up to a national body. I don't think that they should be responsible for the development and the coaching of athletes, because the reason why is and this happens every year and some years it's more prolific than others is that when it comes to selection time for teams, there's always conflicts of interest between employee coaches and their athletes being potentially selected or not selected, over athletes from what people would call outside of the system. So you could go either way with the answer to that question and I'm not really committing to one which is deliberate, but I much prefer the way that I operate because ultimately, it gives me the freedom to do what I need to do on the timeline that I want with the athletes that I work with. It also doesn't potentially put them under any other external constraints with what they may or may not do.

Don:

I think you answered my next question. I'm not going to push on Reece to answer the question you asked, because I don't think it's fair. I know the answer to that. There's no way he's going to. I think he answered most of it in our first episode, but what I got from what you said is the answer to the next one I was going to ask are you crazy or are you just passionate?

Chris:

So, if you ask my partner, jess, I'm definitely crazy. I think about this probably 20 hours a day, and I don't know if that's good or not, but ultimately that's what allows us to think of ways that we can extract performance from the athletes we work with. So I probably am crazy, but I'm very passionate. That's why I do this instead of working full-time on allied health.

Don:

Yeah, so I probably spend a lot more time than I should with you over the last four years training, like because I was there for four days a week training and then strength and conditioning. I think it was last year. You practically said I'm going to do this myself, I can't find a solution. So you invested a lot of money, not a small amount of money. You built everything from the ground up, even to the point where you actually went and started your own track and field club because you wanted to create the environment. So you're recreating the whole thing from the ground up. I don't know a lot of other coaches who would take that risk. That was one of the reasons why I was going to say are you either?

Will:

crazy or you're, you know no, but I think the other thing is like. I think, firstly, it comes from passion, clearly, which I think is a really key, and the other thing that you saw it's definitely not a side hustle, but I think what you touched on is it's non-conflicted. What you're doing Like, because it's sort of like a bit of a passion thing, it's not conflicted. You don't care if any of your athletes, what you do, may go for Australia, but you're not going to be. It's more about extracting the most out of each one of those athletes rather than the outcome is exactly relevant.

Will:

And so, straightaway, you're not conflicted, you're not controlled by anyone, and so why I sort of pushed you on that question, which you rightly sat on the fence with, is I think there's something we can do a lot in australian sport on a lot of those things. So it's not just what you're delivering from a coach perspective, it could be from nutrition, it could be from, you know, it could be finance for, like, we need to centralize the system where we go. Hey, there's five really good operators who are track and field coaches. If, if you're an athlete, here's your five options, you guys go and choose them, because then it puts a bit of response on you, reece, to go right, well, I've got five options here, but I can choose the person that suits me, rather than you know. Oh no, this is your coach, because this is where you've got to go and that might not suit you, because every individual athlete is going to be different. I'm going to be different.

Don:

I'm going to double-click on your training methodologies. Right, you said a lot of big words. They're very cool stuff. Muscle lab, kaiser not synonymous in track and field that much in Australia but these are big things that are emerging globally and it's a trend. It's a quantum shift that's happening with professional coaching, where you know, we are at that sort of precipice of artificial intelligence and data availability where we can start actually looking at real data to make real decisions. Traditional ones haven't had the knowledge or the capability to be able to analyze it in the way that it has to be done, unless you surround yourself with a whole team of people that are experts in data analytics, human anatomy and physics. To be honest, right, the fact that there's one guy who could do all of that, that makes a big difference in your point of view. What are you doing? Yeah, well, what is this new thing that's coming?

Chris:

I think just to answer your question in a moment.

Chris:

To go back to what Will said before, I think about why I do what I do and the reason we do it is because, like because in the earlier episode we spoke about, like, my family involvement in athletics and the you know what we've done and you know my parents and my family, like, we've always encouraged me from when I was small to like, if you're going to do something, you do it properly and you just do it well the first time. So if that's the way that you're looking at coaching and trying to create an environment, well, it's going to be a no-brainer with what you're going to do. You're going to try to be the first people to create a privatised elite environment that's away from the academies, whether that's QIS, nswis, vis, away from the National Institute Network. You're going to try to do it and see if it works, because if you do it and we're successful, maybe other people will do it.

Chris:

Now just in the last 12 months since I've done it, I've become good friends with another coach in Melbourne who comes from a weightlifting background. His name is Brandon Icardi and he's pushed me into the education route because that's with what his business does. But just through our relationship he has turned his weightlifting club into almost a clone of what I'm doing in Brisbane. So there's more people now that are looking at alternatives with training not just in track and field but other sports as well. So, yeah, that's why. But these things? So if you want to get high-level results, you need to have a high-level training environment. To do that, you need to be embedded with the latest technology or the best technology and equipment that allows that to happen.

Chris:

These pieces of technology. So Muscle Lab, kaiser. So Muscle Lab is a I guess you could call it an athlete evaluation system. Now it's from a company that's called Ergotest in Norway and they've been around for a very long time, so since the 80s. They create and engineer and make in-house all these various tools that can measure barbell velocities in the gym, jumping performance with force plates, or infrared contact mats, which is what I have to get various metrics in the gym. But they've been around since the 80s. Kaiser is an American strength equipment manufacturer that uses pneumatic resistance instead of traditional mass resistance.

Reece:

The reason why you use it.

Chris:

You know there's a number of reasons, but the first one is it's safer. It doesn't beat the athletes up from like a joint health perspective as anywhere as much, and the intensity of your training is nowhere near the level you can with mass. It's so much higher that you can just improve so much faster. That's been around since the 80s, so that came to market in America in the 80s. These things don't exist here, they're just.

Chris:

people don't use them or they are prohibitively expensive or whatever reason people say, but if you want those results, they're the tools you need to get the job done.

Don:

And there's things like the overspeed running. The technology has been there for.

Chris:

Yeah, so more in terms of we've also got a DynaSpeed which is manufactured by MuscleLab which is very similar to a 1080 Sprint, which is probably more the brand, if you want to call it that, in this particular device, but that was sort of developed at the same time with early collaboration between engineers and whatnot. One's from Sweden which is 1080. Norway has the Muscle Lab products, but all that is is it's a way that you know it uses a robotic motor to either resist movement away from the unit. It's very precise. It's nowhere like a sled.

Reece:

You can make it in half-kilo increments.

Chris:

It will give you force, velocity you know power time measurements but it'll also pull the user towards the unit so you can potentially make them run faster than they could normally do without it. When you've got access to those things, how you can train completely changes, because you can actually put someone on the track and if you want not not that you should, but if you wanted to and you could, you could run at pb level whenever you wanted. You don't need to wait for the perfect wind conditions to do really fast sprinting.

Don:

You could just wheel this out and off you go man, it's, it's again it's it's good to have the equipment, but if you don't have I mean again, it's good to have the equipment, but if you don't have the ability to interpret that data and then apply it, that's where the challenge comes from.

Chris:

Yeah, I think that's where a lot of people maybe get a little bit bogged down when they start to utilise these tools and integrate them in their training system is that more data for the sake of the data isn't good. You need a way that you can systemise it and systemise the collection of the database, but also the analysis of it and like extracting meaning from it as well, and the way I think that you do that is by either having a team of people around you or which I don't do that I've just got myself. The alternative to that is to be almost like a generalist and understand a lot of different elements across all of the different domains of science physics, biomechanics, health science, anatomy, physiology so that you can build what we could call a web of determinants or a key performance indicator or KPI hierarchy or performance descriptors of an event, and then build a measuring web around that to then put into the training system so that you know, across all of these different variables, whether you're getting to where you need to be to hit a certain performance.

Don:

How important is it to have the benchmark data, because that'll be one of the biggest things that would have been missing. You're quite fortunate because you've got a whole big squad that you can tap into to get that benchmark data.

Chris:

Yeah, so normative data is very important, but I think that you can't just have just normative data of everybody. You need to have individual athletes' norms and then, when you're measuring and training, you've got to keep one eye on that and keep one eye on what you're currently measuring, but then a third eye or another investigation into what other cohorts are doing, or other athletes or other people, to see whether what you're doing is actually actually making an impact in making them better, and how much and how much does reese need to know about that?

Will:

like, do you, do you make sure he understands? Or like, is that going, because that's gone straight over my head? So like how much do you get involved in it and ingrain in your brain around how that all works?

Reece:

I. I would say I know a fair amount. I'm just not in depth as Chris, but I mean I would say I'm constantly checking at what power outputs and what data I'm actually gathering and building and seeing sort of where I'm sitting at you know what you're trying to perform at right, like when you're especially with the Kaiser machines, I've seen a big difference.

Don:

Yeah, it's been pre -filtered.

Chris:

I've pre-filtered it and then told the athletes oh, these are the five things we want to know about. So anytime Rhys has a training rep whether that's on the track, in the gym or even like through health, like whether that's physio or osseo or those sort of like table tests he just wants to know am I near where I need to be? If I'm not, how far away am I? What do I have to do to get better? And since that's come into the training system, the intensity of every day's training has you know, you can probably answer that, but it's just gone so far up. It's crazy.

Don:

Yeah, and I think, with the type of numbers we're trying to achieve now, people are getting faster and faster and faster and we are hitting crazy times. Technology is going to be the secret to unlocking some of the other. We still haven't performed faster than Usain Bolt and I think we're going to need the technology to get past that. And it's not a use of weightlifting is using this thing. It's not just exclusive to track and field. I saw this in swimming. Cam McAvoy is the same technology that he was using in the pool, so it's not exclusive and also it can be done and it's very much transferable to other sports. So it means it's about performance, it's not about anything else.

Chris:

Exactly. Yeah, it's about. It isn't about the tool, it's about understanding the sport that you're preparing for, from a web of determinants or the KPIs, and then looking at those KPIs and trying to understand how can we measure them. And then, when we know how to measure them, we know okay, we can now influence them with training. Then your day-to-day training environment becomes much more specific and much more targeted at the things that actually matter to changing performance, because we've measured it Now.

Chris:

A lot of the things that I might measure in the gym from an athletics perspective or a sprinting perspective. There's a little bit of crossover with weightlifting because we're still trying to develop power. You know, accelerating an object Reece is accelerating himself, but in weightlifting we're moving a bar, trying to get it overhead. In swimming you're still trying to move forward, but you're moving through a body of water. So maybe the contraction dynamics of the action are different, but it's still the same approach or same idea of okay, if this is my event, this is my velocity. What are the ways that I create that velocity? How are the ways I can measure that, from a stroke rate, stride rate, displacement thing and then go okay, how can I construct training that can influence that?

Don:

I'd love to get Cam McAvoy and Chris into one room and get them to talk a little bit more about it. I think you know how much does this make it easier for you to train. You know those. It used to be sleds you were pulling. Now you're running with a 1080p string and being able to see the data straight up, like in front of your eyes. How much easier has it been for you as an athlete?

Reece:

I wouldn't say I've been around long enough to really use the sleds. I mean at my young age and within not even in.

Don:

It was just like.

Reece:

I just haven't been around that long for the sleds, I guess, but in the gym.

Don:

He's forgotten already. That shows how young, these kids are? You were running with sleds 2020, 2021,.

Chris:

We were using sleds?

Will:

Yeah, we were.

Don:

He's just forgotten. I know Kids these days with sleds 2020, 2021,.

Reece:

we were using sleds. Yeah, we were. He's just forgotten. I know we were all used to it. I'm pretty sure I've got some photos. I'm going to put it up. Yeah, I must have just forgotten. I would say it's definitely a lot easier. I mean, you can be more precise with your weight and what you're actually wanting to target for each session or what each individual needs to acquire per session. But in the gym I personally have found a lot of benefit because mostly my back injury can't squat heavy and the Kaiser just sort of eliminates all the pain and everything I have because I don't have to worry about the movement of the bar possibly impacting and hurting other areas of my body. I can just sort of get into the Kaiser or, you know, lock in and just rip stuff. I don't actually have to worry about anything else.

Don:

And he's still achieving the same power.

Chris:

No, when we started using the Kaiser three months ago, he was hitting 3,000 watts. Now he's hitting 4,500 watts, which is just if you plot the peak power on a graph of his best rep. It's pretty much straight up. So if that's three months, what's three years? But it's not just about using the equipment, it's about systemizing it in a way that and knowing how to use it, but systemizing it in a way that you know will influence performance so that over time you can continue to get better.

Chris:

What everyone looks at 1080 sprints and dyno speeds is like the silver bullet to all problems that you can just attach yourself to this thing and you can magically run 12 meters a second. You can when you're attached to it, but when you take it off you're not a 12-meter-a-second athlete. So the potential for injury is huge if you use that tooling correctly. But there's a huge upside to performance if you use it correctly and you use it with a long-term strategy and a way that you can scale over time to meet the athlete's needs to hold their hand in improving Rhys.

Don:

what's next? What's coming up? What's next? It's been an exciting few months watching you. What's coming up? What's next? It's been an exciting few months watching you. You just did your season opener and you opened your season at probably one of the fastest times any Australian has run a 400 in Japan two weeks ago.

Reece:

Yes, yes, yes, I did. That was a surreal. It was another surreal experience. I mean I was in the Tokyo Olympic Stadium. It's where World Champs will be later this year. It was good to have you know three sort of runs within two weeks. As a season opener Did two runs in Guangzhou for World Relays, some pretty nice splits, and then a week later, I'm in Tokyo.

Don:

Pretty nice splits, dude, you ran a 43-second split, one of the fastest splits ever. That was the fastest split in that event.

Reece:

Fastest split, in that event, fastest Australian split ever. I think it was 25th fastest split ever in a 400.

Don:

Yeah don't downplay it.

Reece:

That was crazy. And then, yeah, it was good to get some points on the board for first, 400 of the season and a season opener, a nice time which will be handy for getting into meets sort of later on this year. But we're back now for a six-week block, so two cycles and then off to Europe again, which will be nice, and then you're guaranteed right spot in the World Championships where we've got two relays and the 400?. I'd like to hope so.

Chris:

Nothing's guaranteed. Nothing's guaranteed there, but it's very likely he'll be selected.

Don:

But the Australian record is guaranteed.

Reece:

It'll happen, just a matter of time.

Chris:

The way we look at it is if you chase the performance, then the time comes.

Don:

How would you put this season opener versus last season opener?

Chris:

Oh, it's not even like so. Rhys' first 400 was his second fastest time ever. That was this year. Last year in June he ran 45.19 off the plane in Europe. So there's a lot of context behind the different years, but he's very much further ahead than he was last year. So come September we would be hopeful that he would run substantially faster.

Don:

Just don't slow down this time, Matt. I think on that we should wrap up. It's been a pleasure chatting to both of you. Thanks for bringing us into the crazy mind of yours. It's very fascinating. And, Rhys, first time anyone's ever run a 43 seconds out of Australia. Did Darren Clark run 43?

Reece:

Yeah, there's two, me and Darren Clark. Now Okay.

Don:

Yeah, nice Good company to be in. Good luck um. We'll be cheering you on um are you running the?

Chris:

relays, yeah, at the should be yeah, so you know there's a lot, of, a lot of things with relays, but it's very likely that reese will be in the relay pool after he's on his 400, which I think the the australian team is probably the best we've had in a long time, and they could even challenge for our record. Yeah, wow For the 4x4.

Don:

Yeah, Good luck. And good luck with the rest of the squad.

Chris:

Thank you, thank you.

Will:

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