This time last year triple jumper Keturah Orji was kicked out of her training facilities, and her main goal -- the 2020 Olympic Games -- were postponed. Not knowing what the future would hold, the eight-time NCAA champion at the University of Georgia and five-time U.S. champion headed back to familiar territory to regroup.
Now, after the most bizarre offseason of Orji’s career, she has reclaimed her American record in the triple jump and refocused her training for this summer’s Olympic Trials and Games.
“I am excited for the competition again,” Orji said. “There is another top American in my event, Tori Franklin, who everytime we battle it out we are always trading American records. So I think it will be very exciting to see what we can do there (Olympic Trials).”
In January 2020, Orji relocated from her training bases in Athens and Atlanta to the Chula Vista Elite Athlete Training Center near San Diego. Not only was she adjusting to a new city when the pandemic began, but she also had to learn a completely foreign approach to training.
Orji’s new coach, Jeremy Fischer, trains athletes differently than what Orji experienced during her record-setting career at Georgia. Fischer’s approach to training included more diverse weight regimens, different bounding drills and various running distances.
When the training center shut down, Orji decided it would be best for her to move back to Atlanta with her fiance and sister. But with the trials nowhere in sight and Orji’s meet schedule completely blank, she began struggling to stay in shape.
“There wasn’t a lot of motivation inside of me,” she said. ”There was nothing on my schedule for months.”
She kept asking herself, “What am I here training for today? What purpose is this serving me?”
Knowing the pandemic would eventually come to an end, Orji realized that she did not want to be in worse physical shape coming out of it than she was at the start. It was this realization that gave her the motivation to continue training for an unforeseeable future.
During the next eight months Orji would continue to train in Atlanta with her family. Whether it was using a vacant parking lot as a track lane, curbs for box jumps, or YouTube workouts on rainy days, she got creative with conditioning and remained hopeful for the return of normalcy.
“Keturah is such a hard worker and is so dedicated to whatever she is doing,” said Kendell Williams, Orji’s former teammate and Olympic hopeful. “Her goals are just so ironed out. I love practicing with Keturah because she brings max effort to practice and we would use each other to perform our best.”
Last October, Orji made her way back to California to resume training, but it was not until this February that USATF released the updated competition schedule for the 2020 U.S. Olympic Team Trials.
“It (going back to Chula Vista) was kind of like a restart to a whole new track season,” Orji said. “I started training in October, and we didn’t put on spikes until February.”
Over the past several months, she has been getting her body re-accustomed to Fischer’s way of training and giving herself the time it needed to become in tune with his training methods.
Orji saw her training come to fruition when she broke Franklin’s American record in the triple jump at the second Chula Vista High Performance Meet in late April with a jump that measured 14.92 meters.
The U.S. Olympic Trials run from June 18-27. If Orji places in the top one-third at the Trials, she secures her spot in Tokyo, where she will compete against the best triple jumpers in the world at the Olympic Games.
“It is hard to give her (Orji) advice because she has such a level head, but if anything, I would just tell her to trust her training and know that she is prepared to jump really, really far,” Williams said.
The Grady Sports Bureau is part of the sports media program at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
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