This is Stuart Weir’s feature on British Olympian Zharnel Hughes, who is racing more in 2025 to prepare for the upcoming battles in Tokyo! Stuart Weir is our RunBlogRun senior writer for Europe, and he writes several pieces a week on a slow week. On a busy week, he averages to the 150 -175 plus stories a year that he has written for RunBlogRun since 2015! Thanks Stuart!
Zharnel Hughes
Zharnel Hughes finished second in the 100 meters at Pre in 9.91. The winner was Kishane in 9.85 but Trayvon Bromell, Christian Coleman and five others finished behind him. Hughes is easing himself into a long season with the World Championship in mid September. Last time, in Budapest, he was 3rd in the 100 and 4th in the 200.
He explained to me last month his plan for the season: “My coach and I planned out the season, taking in the Grand Slam, to get couple races under my belt and when it gets closer to GB trials, then start to taper down a lot more. So I think we have a good plan. So I’m not worried about it being so late down in September”.
Of the experience of competing in the new Grand Slams he said that he found them: “Very good, very competitive. I needed something like that, especially because I didn’t get enough races in last year. So I needed to get going, find my feedback. I think the competition were very good. I mean back to back rounds. It keeps you sharp, so I like the competitiveness.
I didn’t really do much social media stuff, but there were a lot of photographers and videographers around you in the slams, so there was always content. I just don’t do too much. I just focus on the running part”.
He also commented on the challenge of running the slams on strange layouts, one of which was 130 meters around the bend. He said “I’ve never run that before. So it was kind of weird to execute. Usually I’ll get out like for 60 to 70 meters and then maintain and then slingshot off the bend. But apparently you have to run the bend extremely hard to put yourself in the proper position, because it’s not like the usual 100 metres. So if you’re running the way you usually run the 200 metres, you’re kind of behind and that’s why you saw times looking amateurish”. In Atlanta it was a straight 200.
He stressed that he was using the slams as an early season workout “to sharpen up my speed and tweak little bits as we go along” so judging him on those times was really rather meaningless. Having had frustrations with injury last season, including not being able to run the 200 in the Olympics, he explained how he was working to avoid a repetition of the injuries: “I got my hamstrings cleared up properly so that there’s no scar tissues, ensuring that I caught up all that on my strength and conditioning, especially the little muscles, that there are. We’ve been focusing a lot on that, just ensuring that my recovery is on point, always making sure I’m eating properly, getting proper sleep, getting regular treatments, ice baths. I don’t really like ice baths, but I’m doing them a lot more now just to keep my body clear and just making sure my muscles are nice and soft and cleaned up. all the time”.
The London Diamond League is Saturday 19 July and the UK Championships and World championship trials take place 2-3 August.
Zharnel Hughes was speaking to the GB athletics writers to promote the European Championships in Birmingham 10-16 August 2026, for which 250.000 tickets are available. Find more info at european-athletics.com.
