Senior Nadia Eke – triple the jump, triple the skill

Triple jump aficionado Max Rettig met up with super track star among us, Nadia Eke, CC’15, to hear about her summer representing Ghana in various international athletic games. View her impressive track record (no pun intended) here. Go Lions!

Nadia Eke has been all around the world recently. You could call it study abroad if what she’s studying is how to compete against the best in the world in the triple jump. This past summer, Nadia competed in the Commonwealth Games, an international competition in several sports, one of which is track-and-field. She described the experience as the biggest competition of her career: “I learned a lot from that and I grew a lot too as an athlete.” Eke represented Ghana as one of 71 nations competing in the Games, held in Glasgow, where she faced “mostly Olympic athletes.”

Right after the Commonwealth Games, Eke went straight to Morocco to jump again for Ghana in the African Championships. Her silver medal performance there pushed her through to another, more recent (last weekend) competition in Morocco: the IAAF Continental Cup. The top two performers in each event make the Cup, so Eke is one of the best triple jumpers in all of Africa. She placed seventh overall in her event. “Being able to compete at such a high level in such a short amount of time this summer really made me mature much faster than I have in the last three years as an NCAA athlete,” Nadia said when describing her experience. “I’ve gotten a much better understanding of how to compete at a high level.”

Nadia started jumping when she moved from Ghana to the U.S. She previously played soccer, but “the way the U.S. plays soccer was a little different,” so she stopped. With her mom asking her what she would do next, Nadia joined the track team. “I became a triple jumper because no one signed up for it and the list for every other event was too full.” She taught herself how to jump, but soon found a coach in an 11th grade teacher. Eke placed third in a high school national competition.

“The thing about triple jump is if you want to be really good at it, as a female, you most likely would have to focus on only that.”  Nadia also competes in the long jump for Columbia, but sticks to the triple jump in international competition.

I asked Nadia to explain the difference between the long jump and the triple jump. She proclaimed “It’s a hop, skip and a jump, but if you talk to the most technically sound coach, that’s the totally wrong thing. You don’t want to hop on your first phase.” The two events are measured differently: long jump involves a running start whereas triple jump begins on the first of the three phases.

Nadia doesn’t hold strictly to her game all the time, though. I asked her what she did for fun during her athletic pilgrimages, to which she said “I didn’t go out too much in Glasgow, but I hung out with my teammates and with other teams.” At the IAAF competition last week, though, there was quite the celebration: “…there was a huge party after because it was the end of the season for everyone, so I got to go out a lot.” However, Nadia stressed, “I’ve had more fun hanging out in the hotel with the different people I met.”

In terms of training, Nadia is held to a pretty strict schedule by the NCAA. Athletes are kept to a certain maximum number of hours for training. Though she couldn’t recall the exact number, it is supposedly under 20 per week, which athletes can’t exceed unless they train voluntarily. Nadia still trains about six days per week in the preseason, and practices range from 45-90 minutes. During the season, she trains four days a week and then competes. Her diet, she maintains, is no different.

What’s the craziest thing she has eaten in the name of training?  “I had a burger right before a competition. This was in high school, though, and I didn’t know any better.”

Nadia has competed in several Ivy League and NCAA championships, where she describes the energy levels as being very different. She claims there’s a big jump between NCAA and international competition. Nadia’s personal bests are 6.01 meters (long jump) and 13.4 (triple jump).

To wrap up, I asked whether jumping really high feels like flying. Nadia broke into laughter before answering, “On my really good jumps, when I do time my speed through the board, I kind of feel like…you feel…you do feel floaty…” On the last phase, though, “gravity reminds you that you’re still human and you’re on Earth, so you come back down.”

Interview content edited for brevity and clarity.

Nadia going up in the Columbia blue via Columbia Athletics Communications