The Trail Blazers 7s team from Nabua used the Shop N Save Athletics Fiji competition to prepare for the Fijian Bitter Wairiki 7s on November 28-30 at Wairiki, Taveuni.

Trail Blazers Athletics president Nemani Tukunia said it was important to include athletics in their training programme.

“I believe if you learn the techniques as well as the basics of athletics, it will take you through sports.

“For example, like running techniques contribute immensely to the improvement of individual players and we have seen some major improvement in the players as well.

“In the last couple of weeks we have been focusing on endurance so we focused on speed today (yesterday) and they did quite well, the payers have responded very well.

“We are using this competition to measure and assess our performance especially for our training programme which started just over three weeks ago.

“So we will assess and take that data down and see areas that we can improve on over the next three weeks so this has actually set a platform for the players.”

The Trail Blazers athletics squad is made up of people in volleyball, rugby and athletics.

Meanwhile, Shop N Save Athletics Fiji chief development officer Joseph Rodan (Jnr) said it was great to see the 7s players be a part of the competition especially when athletics was the base for any sport.

“The coaches have been working on an athletics programme for the last four weeks and they are starting to see some good outcome from that,” Rodan said.

“Athletics is the base for any sport, you can’t get fit or you can’t get strong until you run first, there is no short cut to that and its working well for these players.

“Most of them have seen good results and they are building up towards upcoming competitions.”

Rodan stressed the point that athletics is not only for those who are fit or top athletes but for everyone in general.

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