Belle Vernon grad Hannah Seitzinger hopes new workout regimen leads to healthy outdoor track season at Duquesne

“Load management” is a term that has become part of the sports lexicon in recent years. It refers to coaches holding healthy players out of practices and games with the idea of preserving them for the latter part of the season and/or the playoffs.

The practice mostly is looked upon derisively by fans. To their way of thinking, if an athlete is healthy, he or she should be out there competing.

But load management might make all the difference for Duquesne runner Hannah Seitzinger.

Seitzinger, a senior and a Belle Vernon grad, is among the Dukes’ most accomplished runners. Indoors.

On Feb. 24, Seitzinger won the indoor 500 meters at the Atlantic 10 championships for the third consecutive year, breaking her school record with a run of 1 minute, 12.17 seconds. On March 3, she wrapped up her indoor season by helping the 1,600 relay team win gold at the IC4A/ECAC indoor championships with the second-fastest time in program history (3:44.85).

She also set a personal best — and another school record — in the 800 prelims at the IC4A/ECAC meet (2:08.16). She finished fourth in the final of the 800.

Finding Seitzinger’s name among the list of Duquesne outdoor track and field record holders, however, is much harder. Because of injuries, Seitzinger has had only one full outdoor track and field season — her freshman season — during her time on The Bluff.

A stress fracture in her left foot ended her sophomore outdoor season. Her junior season also was shut down in the early stages because of a stress fracture in her right femoral neck, located near the hip.

“Stress fractures just come on suddenly,” Seitzinger said. “There’s nothing you can do to prevent them from happening or find out about them soon enough to get the correct rehab to be able to work through them and continue running. Once you find out about them, you just have to stop.

“I’m really hoping for a healthy (outdoor) season. I think with the plan we have going, it will be achievable.”

Enter load management.

Duquesne track and field coach Jeff Gibson, who also is Seitzinger’s event coach, decided he needed to come up with a plan to try to preserve her for outdoor season. So the two of them talked and decided to limit her running and focus more on cross training.

For starters, when she does run, she avoids hard surfaces. Seitzinger said the team does many training runs through the streets of Pittsburgh, but now she avoids those in favor of running on turf or on trails.

She works out one day on an anti-gravity treadmill to take the strain off her legs and spends a couple of days on a stationary bike. She also will take a full day off each week, with her actual track workouts limited to two a week.

“I’ve never trained anybody this way,” said Gibson, in his third season at Duquesne after spending nearly five years on the staff at Robert Morris. “We changed her training to try to help her manage some of her injuries.”

Added Seitzinger: “It has been working well so far. I think rest is important for an athlete, especially with my history of injuries. At this point, rest is more important than beating up my body.”

If Seitzinger can maintain her health, Gibson is confident she can have a strong outdoor season. The Dukes’ first outdoor meet is March 28-30 at N.C. State.

Gibson converted Seitzinger from being primarily a 400-meter runner in high school to an 800-meter runner. It was an idea she met with skepticism at first, but after she won the event at the 2023 Colonial Relays at George Mason in 2:07.76, she began to see the possibilities.

Now all she has to do is stay healthy.

“She’s as talented as anybody I’ve ever coached in my life,” Gibson said. “She’s a different kid. She’s super talented. I don’t think she even understands how good she can be or how far she can go.

“It’s her makeup. She wants to be good. … She makes sure she eats right, she goes to see our trainer and gets treatment, gets to bed and gets her rest. Her mental makeup … she gets nervous like everybody, but I think the good ones learn how to channel it and stay relaxed and don’t let the moment become too big.”

Coming off her performance in the indoor 800, Seitzinger said she feels like she is close to where she was last year after she ran the 2:07.76 and before her hip injury.

Staying healthy and completing a full outdoor season might be especially important considering this could be her last go-round. She has a fifth year of eligibility, but using it depends on a couple of factors.

First, she wants to see how her body holds up this spring. Secondly, she is a 4.0 student in Duquesne’s physician’s assistant program and will do her required clinical rotations next year, so that schedule could make it impossible to fit in track.

Though her outdoor track experience has had more downs than ups, Seitzinger is confident her new workout regimen can help her finish strong.

“I think the sky is the limit,” she said. “I just want to go out there and have an open mind and see what I can do. I’m really hoping to make regionals for the 800. I’ve never been to regionals before, so I think that would be an awesome opportunity.”