Teenager Allanah Pitcher ready to walk the World ‘Champs’ walk

Nineteen-year-old New South Wales Institute of Sport (NSWIS) scholarship athlete Allanah Pitcher has been rewarded for her leap of faith to commit to the gruelling 35 kilometre walk with selection in the Australian 2023 World Championships team that will compete in Budapest.

Pitcher, a self employed mathematics tutor and Biomedical Engineering student at the University of Sydney, produced a stunning performance in Japan last April to smash the Australian record for the 35km walk by three minutes.

While that race heralded her rapid transition from junior to senior athlete, adding lustre to Pitcher’s effort was that she’d only competed in a few 20km walks as a junior athlete.

“It was a lot of fun – surprisingly,” Pitcher, from the Central Coast, told Athletics NSW reporter David Tarbottom.

“I really liked the longer distance and slightly easier pace of sustained walking. I only decided to race the 35km the week before. The longest I had walked was 30km in training. I thought I had nothing to lose.”

In recalling her incredible feat in Japan, Pitcher admitted to feeling uncertain about how she would attack the race.

“I wasn’t sure what I was going to do going into it,” she said. “’Do I play it safe and try and qualify (for the world championships) via points or go for the qualifier?’

“It was good conditions and a really good track and good opposition. So, I decided to use the atmosphere to push me and hang onto the pace.

“I felt really comfortable on target pace, so I thought I’d do this as long as I can. I went through 20k feeling really good and thought ‘there is only 15k to go, so let’s try and hold this’. Each ‘k’ went past I thought ‘I’m stilling doing it’ then got to a point where I thought ‘this is going to happen.”

Pitcher clocked 2:50.23, slicing three minutes off the national record, and she’s now preparing to make her senior debut in one of the most grueling and technical events on the World Athletics Championships schedule.

She also finds herself in a race where each competitor will be determined to put on a show as the athletics world bids farewell to the longer distance format of the discipline to make room for the marathon racewalk mixed relay, set to make its debut at the Paris Olympics.

Her lead up to the championships includes a stint of altitude training at St Moritz before adding the final touches to preparations at the AIS training base in Varese, Italy.

Daniel Lane, NSWIS