Zooming through life with Zoe Hobbs.
Image credit: Alisha Lovrich
While most of us have treated 2022 as a year to defrost from two years of ups and (lock)downs, Kiwi sprinter Zoe Hobbs has fired through the year snatching up records left, right and centre.
Prior to turning twenty-five this September, she scored herself the Oceania area record for the 100m sprint, the NZ record for 100m, the Oceania area record for indoor 60m, the NZ record for indoor 60m, a place in the World Championships semi-final, and a place in the Commonwealth Games final. Just listing out those achievements has one out of breath, let alone the work it would have taken to earn them. I caught up with Zoe to get an insight into her outstanding year, her passions outside of sport, and her advice for aspiring athletes.
Despite understanding how difficult it must be to articulate the buzz of such a stellar season, I ask Zoe to describe how it felt to tick off several bucket-list sprinting achievements this year. She agrees that it is hard to put into words, not only because she hugely exceeded her expectations, but also due to the whirlwind pace at which she smashed goal after goal. She recalls that following the Commonwealth Games final, her last race before returning home for a well-deserved rest, she broke down crying as she was hit with a realisation of how much work it had taken to get to that point.
“I’d been working towards that moment my whole life. I’ve been in the sport since the age of five so to run in the final was pretty crazy, and you can hear that I’m quite emotional talking about it,” she explains.
Zoe deservedly chokes up when telling me her countless feats, and despite the computer screen mediating our conversation, I am touched by her pride for what she has achieved. Initially, I am surprised at the fact that I have wet eyes two minutes into our chat, however my emotions are easily justified by the significance of Zoe’s achievements. Zoe being the first Kiwi female since 1990 to make a 100m Commonwealth final, not only marks her name in sporting history, but also inspires young Kiwi girls to give athletics a go. She smiles at the potential of her achievements to motivate girls to go from beating their brothers in beach sprints or flying away in backyard touch rugby, to applying their athleticism on the track.
Female sprint athletes are definitely capturing the attention of fans and media the world over at the moment, with five of the ten fastest women ever over the 100m having competed in championships this season. After poring over the coverage of the 2022 World Athletics Championships and the Commonwealth Games, my inner athletics fangirl escapes to ask Zoe how it felt to settle in the blocks alongside the heroes of her sport.
As her mind appears to briefly reminisce on the surreal experiences of the last few months, she has one word, “Incredible.”
Racing against idols from her childhood and teenage years, such as Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, the world lead, and Elaine Thompson-Herah, the fastest woman alive, left her speechless.
Whilst an amazing opportunity, Zoe reveals how being pitted against legends of her sport was also understandably intimidating, “The start is where my strength is but I wasn’t quite used to having athletes of that level next to me and I started to tense up which can see your technique go out the window a little bit.”
As an unashamed athletics nerd, I’m desperate to get an insight into what goes on prior to rubbing shoulders with fellow competitors on the start line. Did Zoe get the chance to chit-chat with champions off-camera in the marshalling area, or was the atmosphere defined by stone-cold silence? Without hesitation, she recalls that everyone was completely quiet and in the zone as they waited to be ushered onto the track. As she continues to exhibit her down-to-earth-yet-mature attitude while we chat, I can imagine Zoe being easily adaptable to all sorts of pre-race scenarios.
Obviously before athletes can even earn their place in races, they are required to undergo endless preparation. As Zoe documents her extensive and varied physical training to her forty-thousand followers on Instagram, it is her mental discipline and motivation that I am really eager to unpack. I discover that her potentially unconventional, but obviously successful technique for ensuring her mind works as hard as her body, is to allow herself to feel truly nervous.
“Feeling nerves is actually a good thing. You just need to embrace it and use that adrenaline to help you in the race. Personally, nerves allow me to thrive, they almost make me hyper-focused,” says Zoe.
As expected, Zoe shares that she was extremely nervous in the morning prior to her heat at the 2022 World Champs. However, she used the nerves to her advantage by viewing them as a reminder of how capable she was of making the semi-final - and she did just that.
Image credit: Alisha Lovrich
Despite the groundbreaking achievements that Kiwi track athletes such as Zoe have to their name, and the regular training, nutrition, and recovery regimes which define their lifestyles, the current funding reality requires them to simultaneously pursue careers outside of their sport. Zoe’s career outside of sprinting feeds perfectly into her active lifestyle (apologies in advance for the pun), and proves she is a well-rounded talent. After graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Human Nutrition, Zoe lent her skills to developing recipes for Nourish, a handy app that provides nutritious meal plans for anyone wanting to establish wholesome food practices.
In a move that strengthens the natural link between her passions for sport and nutrition, Zoe reveals that she now dedicates her time outside of training to Athos, a sister company of Nourish which she co-founded.
Athos, which is still building up to its launch, will cater to the nutritional needs of athletes, and also help fulfill Zoe’s drive to bridge the gap between developing athletes and accessible, affordable nutrition services. Just in case she happens to have a pocket of spare time, Zoe is also studying towards the International Olympic Committee’s Diploma in Sports Nutrition. There is a spark in Zoe’s eye as she talks of her desire to nurture youth towards healthy eating habits. In a world where she must constantly look inwards at how she is fuelling herself to perform her best, Zoe’s determination to help others is super admirable.
As an all-round excellent role model to girls around the country, I prod Zoe to offer up any wise words she can gift to aspiring athletes. She responds by encouraging girls to dip their toes into all sorts of sports, so they can stumble upon the physical activity that genuinely sparks their interest - whether that’s shooting hoops, smacking sixes, or dipping over finish lines. During her years as a youngster in Taranaki she tried anything and everything that got her blood pumping. Surprisingly, athletics wasn’t her specialty until her final year of high-school, proving that you don’t need to limit yourself to perfecting one sport from the start to end of your schooling years. Naturally Zoe is an advocate for participating in sport, and talks highly of the additional goodies that a variety of physical activity grants young girls, such as lifelong friends and endless moments of fun.
The value of sport to all aspects of Zoe’s life is evident, as her humility and gratitude for her career radiates throughout our conversation. For my parting question, I ask what it is that makes her incredible yet challenging career as a sprinter so rewarding.
“It is the moments like finishing the Commonwealth Games final, when you truly reflect and allow yourself to be proud of all the work you have put in and the grind that it has taken to achieve what you had set out to do.”
As an athlete who has deservedly brought a sport that often flies under the radar in NZ back into the spotlight, Zoe is without a doubt one to watch. With the record-breaking season of 2022 behind her, her goals now are to make World and Olympic finals, and as she so perfectly puts it, “It’s not an easy sport to achieve in, but that’s what makes it so worthwhile when those goals do get ticked.”
