While injuries are often a good standard excuse for unmet expectations, this year’s edition of the McGill track team might be able to make an argument.

Standard track injuries coupled with the less-clichéd flu bug, forced many athletes to sit out important meets. Illness, however, wasn’t enough to stop middle distance runner Sarah Ali-Khan from setting a McGill record for career medals. It also wasn’t enough to stop the entire McGill team from maintaining its dominance in the relays and middle distance running during the season.

Ali-Khan, perennial All-Canadian, ended this year’s stellar performance by winning three medals at the Canadian Interuniversity Athletics Union Track & Field championships. She won a gold medal in the 1000- meter run, setting a record for the fastest time this year, a silver medal in the 1500-meter run and anchored the 4x800 meter relay team to a gold medal finish.

Ali-Khan was responsible for an astonishing nineteen of the twenty-five points won by the Martlet team, bringing them to seventh place out of 26 teams at Nationals.

“I’m really pleased… though I still wished I could have won the gold in the 4x800 and the 1500 but it was a tough race,” commented the twenty-six year old pharmacology student.

Ali-Khan’s medal count now stands at eight: four golds, three silvers and a bronze, setting a McGill record for the highest number of medals won by an athlete. Ali-Khan spent part of the year in her native New Zealand where she was able to take a different training strategy.

“When I was in New Zealand, I did a couple of long runs… because it’s summer down there when it’s winter here, and I did some hiking with heavy packs…It was a short training season because I got the flu, but the cross country season kept me strong so had a fair bit of endurance when I was running,” she said after returning from a meet in Quebec City.

Martlet triple jumper Dawn Creighton had a good season placing first at the invitational meets and besting her personal best record by twenty-centimetres at the McGill invitational a month ago. Creighton placed sixth in the women’s triple jump at CIAU nationals.

Redmen middle distance runner Yohsuke Hayashi anchored the 4x800 meter relay team into a fifth place finish, and won a silver in the 1000 meter run. Hayashi’s performance accounted for all of McGill’s scoring, placing them at twelfth out of 26 teams in the nation.

Track coach Dennis Barrett had to contend with many athletes being taken out of commission by flu season on top of a string of injuries that weakened both the men’s and the women’s teams. The men’s power team was decimated by health complications that kept it from reaching its potential.

Setbacks forced Barrett to focus rather on generating a mix of athletes and collecting more specialised coaches to focus on specific events for the track team.

“In terms of a few areas we can improve on? The women’s team we have is a really good collection of women athletes we’d like them to get more involved and they’d like to get more involved,” he said on the subject of the women’s team. “We had a good mixture of vets and rookies and if we could keep them moving in the right direction keep them trying I think it will be good year… Next year we’re going to try to get more coaches to them [the athletes] and the specialised coaches that they need,” he continued commenting on next year’s prospects.