How Devyaniba, the best female athlete at U-23 Athletics Nationals, aced the art of running 400 metres?

She might have won the best women’s athlete award after winning gold in the women’s 400m with a time of 53.50 at the U-23 Athletics National Championships last week in Patna but Devyaniba Zhala isn’t satisfied with the result.

“I was thinking I could finish in under 53 seconds. That was my goal. Unfortunately, it rained on the track just one hour before the race. Otherwise, I should have run faster,” she tells Sportstar.

While her ambitions are lofty, they are also a testament to her improvement as an athlete this season. Exactly a year ago, Devyaniba had competed in the same competition – the U-23 Nationals in Chandigarh. There, competing in the women’s 100m and 200m, she could not make the final in either race.

“At that point in time, I’d never even medalled at any national race. My father used to accompany me to all my competitions and I felt bad that he was never getting to see me win anything,” she recalls.

It would take a new coach, a shift in cities and most importantly a change of event for Devyaniba to finally hit her stride as an athlete.

Growing up in Rajkot, Gujarat, sport wasn’t an obvious choice for Devyaniba. Except for Saritaben Gayakwad, who competed internationally for India in the 400m, the state doesn’t have much of a tradition of women track athletes. It was Devyaniba’s father, Mahendra Singh Zala, who encouraged her to pursue sport.

“Gujarat doesn’t have a history of girls playing sports but I always wanted my daughter to be an athlete. I used to follow the stories of PT Usha when I was young and then I would tell Devyaninba of athletes like Hima Das and Dutee Chand,” says Mahendra Singh who runs a transport business.

Devyaniba was 14 when she started out as a track athlete training at Rajkot’s Racecourse grounds. She was good enough to win medals at the state level but it was harder to make a mark at the national level.

“The level of competition in Gujarat is much weaker than that at the national level. The first time I competed at the junior nationals I finished out in the heats. I wasn’t disappointed because at that time I just wanted to get a chance to compete at the nationals,” she says.

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Despite her lack of early success at the national level, Devyaniba wasn’t discouraged. “My father was never upset at the fact that I wasn’t winning anything. He would always accompany me every time I competed out of the state,” she says.

At that point in her career, Devyaniba competed in the 100m and 200m. Those were the two events she had started training in and she admits she was scared of trying something different.

“I wasn’t even sure I had the stamina to run a 400m race. Every time I thought about competing in it, I lost my nerve,” she says. Although she did attempt that distance once – at the 2022 University Games, she failed to pace herself and clocked a time of 1.02, finishing 38th overall. “It was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life,” she admits saying.

While she continued to run the 100 and 200m events, Devyaniba knew she wasn’t really going anywhere as an athlete. In 2023, as a 21-year-old she had a personal best of 12.25 in the 100m and 24.72 in the 200m. These were solid but not spectacular numbers.

Devyaniba would never medal even at the national level with these numbers.

“Even in the juniors, to win a medal in the 100m you had to run in the 11.80 range. With my timings, I would go out in heats and if I did make the finals, I’d finish sixth or seventh only,” she says.

It was a chance encounter with Bangalore-based coach Ajay Arjun at the 2023 U-23 National Championships which would be the turning point in her career. Arjun, who has previously coached junior world medallist Priya Mohan and Junior Asian champion Heena Rezoana Mallick, was looking to try something different as a coach.

“When Deyvaniba’s father approached me asking if I could coach her, I was interested. She didn’t have any real history running the 400m but that was fine. I would rather work with someone who has a lot of room for improvement. More importantly, she was an interesting challenge as a coach. I’ve always worked with athletes who were from the typical 400m mould.

“They had good endurance but I had to work on their sprint ability. But in Devyaniba’s case, she was already a sprinter. She was running in the 12.3-second range for the 100m and 24.7 in the 200m and I knew that at the very least I would be able to make her a 400m runner in the 52-second range,” he says.

While Arjun was confident he would be able to make her a good 400-metre runner, the challenge was to get her to agree to shift events and also her base. “To have a future in Indian athletics I told her she had to move to the 400m. And then she would also have to move to Bangalore. I knew that would be tough because not every girl will be willing to shift multiple states to pursue a career, ” he says.

She would agree to both conditions, moving to the south Indian city in November last year. She currently stays in the home of one of her father’s friends, commuting 10 kilometres to the Kanteerava Stadium each day to train with coach Arjun.

Things have mostly fallen in place ever since.

“When she started she was barely able to finish a 300m repetition because she’d never done a sprint of over 250m. As a 100m runner, she had always only just had to focus on her acceleration drive. But to run a 400, there has to be some running pattern as well. We had to slowly find a way to get her to conserve her energy so that she could maintain her speed to the end of her race,” says Arjun.

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Just a year into her transition as a full-fledged 400m runner, Arjun is satisfied with her progress – the U-23 national title came in what was only her fourth competition in the 400m run. However, he says there’s plenty of improvement that is still possible.

“There is a lot of work to be done. Right now we haven’t really worked a lot on her endurance. This season was just about getting her to complete the 400m race,” he says.

Even so, he knows she could have gone even faster. “We had done a training camp in Ooty where she had run at a time of 52.2. That means she should be capable of running in the 51-second range. Unfortunately, it hasn’t happened yet but we are working on that.

That timing might have to wait until 2025, even though both Devyaniba and Arjun don’t want to limit themselves to that number. “We are having an open target because we don’t want to have limits,” he says. Devyaniba states her targets even more clearly. “ My target is to run in the 51-second range. I think I can do that. I know that I can make the Indian team with that timing and I want to take part at the Asian Championships and qualify for the 2025 World Championships,” she says.

These are steep tasks but Devyaniba believes she is capable of accomplishing them. “When I started running there weren’t that many girls from Gujarat who were even competing at the national level. Now I’m winning also. I also know what I’m doing in training. I know I can achieve all the goals I’ve set for myself. I want to prove to everyone else that I am also capable,” she says.