{"id":556011,"date":"2026-03-23T20:41:12","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T20:41:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/556011\/"},"modified":"2026-03-23T20:41:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T20:41:12","slug":"cycling-crystals-and-cutting-edge-science-the-secrets-of-hodgkinson-and-hunter-bells-success-athletics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/556011\/","title":{"rendered":"Cycling, crystals and cutting-edge science: the secrets of Hodgkinson and Hunter Bell\u2019s success | Athletics"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was the architect of the London 2012 Olympics who said it best, shortly after Britain\u2019s Keely Hodgkinson, Georgia Hunter Bell and Molly Caudery<\/a> had lit up the world indoor championships with three gold medals in 29 minutes. \u201cThat was a towering moment, not just for UK Athletics but for British sport,\u201d said Sebastian Coe, now the World Athletics president. \u201cIt was very exciting, hugely inspirational. I really do hope they cause a stampede to local athletics clubs, particularly among young girls.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soon afterwards, Trevor Painter and Jenny Meadows, the husband and wife coaching team who have guided Hodgkinson and Hunter Bell to glory, were explaining the secrets behind their success \u2013 ranging from cycling to crystals to cutting-edge science \u2013 before predicting the best was yet to come.<\/p>\n

Painter says Hodgkinson was feeling so good that she felt she might break her world indoor 800m record again in the final on Sunday, despite having raced twice in two days. \u201cWarming up she said: \u2018I feel amazing. I won\u2019t be surprised if I get a PB here,\u2019\u201d Painter says. \u201cI went: \u2018OK, your PB is a world record.\u2019 Afterwards she had no lactic [acid]. And she was like: \u2018I\u2019m just going to do the 4x400m relay,\u2019 and an hour later she ran 50.10sec.\u201d<\/p>\n

No one in the field of specialist 400m runners ran quicker, which makes Painter believe that even greater peaks are around the corner, including Hodgkinson possibly taking down the 800m outdoor world record, set in 1983.<\/p>\n

What has changed? \u201cIt\u2019s the first time since Budapest in 2023 where she\u2019s turned up to a championship 100% healthy,\u201d Painter says. \u201cEven at the Paris Olympics<\/a> she had a bit of a niggle and missed some of the winter. But this year she\u2019s not missed a session. So we\u2019re seeing times she normally does in summer already.\u201d<\/p>\n

Keely Hodgkinson and Georgia Hunter Bell during a training session in Potchefstroom, South Africa. \u2018They elevate each other,\u2019 says Trevor Painter, who coaches them alongside his wife, Jenny Meadows. Photograph: Alessandro Levati\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Painter thinks it helps that Nike has given them a budget for a physiotherapist, Alison Rose, who has kept Hodgkinson\u2019s hamstring problems under control and a physiologist, Rachel McCormick, who formerly worked at the Australian Institute of Sport.<\/p>\n

\u201cKeely\u2019s just in a very happy place at the moment, relationships\u2011wise,\u201d Painter says. \u201cShe\u2019s moving house, so that\u2019s exciting, when you have all those things coming together.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hodgkinson believes Himalayan salt crystals<\/a> have helped to calm her. \u201cIt\u2019s about making the human happy,\u201d Painter says. \u201cIf they\u2019re in a happy place they\u2019re going to perform well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meadows stresses how Hodgkinson and Hunter Bell push each other in training, with the former having more speed and the latter more speed endurance. Despite often going head-to-head they remain great friends. \u201cThey\u2019re a dynamic duo,\u201d she says. \u201cThey elevate each other,\u201d Painter adds.<\/p>\n

They are very different personalities, however. Shortly after she broke the world indoor 800m record in February<\/a>, Hodgkinson had a night on the town with her friends to celebrate her birthday when she bumped into Coe and Collette Roche, a Manchester United chief executive. \u201cWe thought it was quite funny,\u201d Meadows says. \u201cBut we do keep reminding ourselves that Keely can\u2019t be a robot.<\/p>\n

\u201cGeorgia\u2019s like me. I was a robot and I\u2019m very analytical. Georgia\u2019s exactly the same. But Keely\u2019s a free spirit. You have to keep things flexible for her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Keely Hodgkinson with coaches Trevor Painter and Jenny Meadows during a winter training camp in South Africa. Photograph: Michael Steele\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

One big shift over the winter is that Hodgkinson has started cycling on her easy endurance days and she enjoys it so much that one\u2011hour sessions sometimes turn into 90 minutes. \u201cWe\u2019ve had to rein her back,\u201d Meadows says. \u201cIt\u2019s just great, though. She finds it so boring on a static bike or the elliptical [machine] in the gym. If she wants to carry on in this sport for a decade or more, we have to let her enjoy life.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is that approach to coaching \u2013 art, science and the arm around the shoulder \u2013 that make Painter and Meadows among the best in the world. \u201cTrevor does all the programming and he\u2019s absolutely brilliant,\u201d Meadows says. \u201cThere can be seven different training sessions going on within the same session because everyone\u2019s so bespoke. Keely needs a little bit more of this, Georgia needs that, somebody else needs something else. I don\u2019t know how he does it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Painter insists a key part of his philosophy is that he does not want athletes doing too much long slow running for the aerobic content of the training. \u201cWe have to have speed work, lactate work, threshold work and then long slow volume, so we do as much of the long slow stuff on bikes, in swimming pools, on cross trainers, or ellipticals,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s up to each individual. Some girls love swimming, some like cycling. As long as they\u2019re giving me, say, 45 minutes on a bike, it\u2019s as good as 30-35 minutes on the running, but without the impact. Then when we run on the track and we\u2019re doing sessions we feel sharper and the sessions are better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Painter says that, even with her science background, McCormick has been surprised with how quickly Hodgkinson and Hunter Bell recover between sessions. \u201cA lot of the science has been done on 5k, 10k and marathon runners. You look at Jakob Ingebrigtsen and it\u2019s all double threshold work and keeping your blood lactate down sub\u2011four, things like that.<\/p>\n

Ethan Massey, Georgia Hunter Bell, Keely Hodgkinson and Catriona Bisset on a training run in Lausanne, followed by Trevor Painter on a bike. Photograph: Michael Steele\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s testing us and we\u2019re up in the 20s. And then she\u2019s like: \u2018Oh they\u2019re going to be screwed for like a week here.\u2019 Then two days later we\u2019re up in 20s again and she\u2019s blown away by how we\u2019ve worked like that and then come back and do it again. It\u2019s down to a steady buildup of work over the years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Painter believes McCormick\u2019s work is just getting started. \u201cIn the long term, she\u2019s going to be of massive help in terms of how we get even better.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was the architect of the London 2012 Olympics who said it best, shortly after Britain\u2019s Keely Hodgkinson,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":556012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[445],"tags":[49,48,635,82],"class_list":["post-556011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cycling","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=556011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/556012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=556011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=556011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=556011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}