Send this article by email What is your name? Please indicate below the emails to which you want to send this article: Repairs Create Hurdles for Athletes Enter one email per line. No more than 5 emails. By Joanna Quintanilla Lanes one through three of the track at Redwood Bowl are closed until repairs can be made this summer, an issue that has affected training for Humboldt State track athlete Jéni Hardy and even lead to longer practices for the team. “It’s affected me and my team really bad because we don’t have enough lanes to do practice,” Hardy said. “We have to stagger everybody and it just takes more time for practice. With track season in full swing the lack of lanes to train in has had a dramatic impact on practices for the team, according to Assistant Track coach Sarah Ingram. “On practice days when we have all of our event groups out there at the same time I have 30 to 40 athletes trying to get through practice and we only have three lanes,” Ingram said. Traci Ferdolage,associate vice president of facilities management, said the decision to close the lanes came after noticing that the first three lanes of the track would be better off with more in-depth repairs. “Our intent is to do repairs that will permanently reopen those three lanes,” Ferdolage said. “Right now we have those three lanes blocked off because those are the ones in the worst shape.” Ferdolage said this summer’s repairs will focus on those first three lanes in an attempt to make the track last one more year before being replaced in the Summer of 2017. Ingram feels it was an oversight to allow the track to have gotten in the condition it is and that it should have been replaced years ago. “The track is like eight years overdue in terms of when it was supposed to be replaced,” Ingram said. “I don’t think they had it on their radar in the way that they should have, in terms of it’s gonna need to be repaired and replaced in a normal timeline based on how long the track is supposed to lastwhen they bought it originally back in the nineties.” As an athlete Hardy has felt firsthand how necessary a new track is at HSU. “I feel very disappointed because next [year] is my last year here and I would really like to run on a nice track where my shins wouldn’t hurt,” Hardy said. Send this article by email What is your name? Please indicate below the emails to which you want to send this article: Repairs Create Hurdles for Athletes Enter one email per line. No more than 5 emails.