Into the Fast Lane Down Under: by Jason Dunkerley

Its been a while since I've written a blog post, as my brother reminded me recently. It feels like this fall has flown by. We have been busy at ALA working on several project funding applications and moving forward with All Abilities Welcome workshops. We also had the third of four speaker orientation training sessions for Atlantic based speakers in Halifax in November. Aside from that, a few of us here have finally put our talk of forming an Achilles running club into action and the club is slowly getting off the ground, and I'm excited and very proud to see this initiative take shape.

After an intense summer track season culminating in August with three attempts at running sub 2 minutes for 800 metres which would have established a new blind world record, and three near misses, Greg and I took our customary ten-day break at the end of the season and started up again in early September. Right away, and probably due to starting back a little too hard, I developed a sore right achilles, which persisted throughout the first part of the fall. I would train for a few days and then have to take up to a week off to let it recover, and was getting a lot of massage treatment along with doing achilles strengthening exercises, acupuncture and some sessions with an athletic therapist. Finally by mid October, my injury became manageable and I was able to ease back into things slowly and begin stringing together some workouts.

When you are injured, you start to wonder if it will ever be possible to get into good shape again, and to question what that might take. During the time off, I had been able to keep up with some cross training on an elliptical machine I have at home, and I think this really made a difference because within a couple of weeks of being back running, I started feeling good and workouts started to go well. For me this affirmed that keeping up some form of consistency with training, even if it isn't what you normally might do, is really crucial to being able to get back on track when it is the right time and when your body is ready.

Unlike other years, we are ramping things up at the moment with training towards a January peak. We typically try to peak in the summer and generally spend this time of the year building fitness and aiming towards some low key indoor winter races. This year is different though, as Greg and I are part of a team of 32 Canadian athletes who will be heading to Australia and then on to New Zealand in January for the International Paralympic Committee World Championships which are being held in Christchurch. We'll be competing in the 800m and 1500m races. Our Canadian team surpassed expectations this past summer with some outstanding results which see us well placed going into the competition. There is a real mix of youth and experience among our group and its going to be incredibly exciting to see what people can do in that environment. Here in Ottawa, we are very fortunate to have access to a 400 metre indoor track, one of only a few in the world. This means that the transition from an indoor to outdoor track should be fairly straightforward for us. Most of our other Canadian contingent do not have the luxury of a 400m indoor track however, and hard training in Canada geared towards a January peak presents unique challenges for the team as a whole.

For Greg and I, our build-up so far has gone very well. Greg was still working through planter fasciitis through the early part of the fall and as it turned out, we each started back into everyday running again at roughly the same time. We've trained together either in Toronto or here in Ottawa on all but one of the weekends since the end of October. Unlike our build-up last spring, we have approached things more from the 1500 metre end of things, with less of a focus on the hard anaerobic stuff in place of longer intervals, while still keeping in touch with 1500m and 800m paces. I've also received some great guiding help from Ottawa based runners, including my friend Kyle, and Matt and Cody who train with the Lions.

I'm really encouraged to see what all this training will translate into when it comes to racing in January. So far I've competed in two low-key indoor races, a 1500m which Greg and I soloed in 4:24, and an 800m last Thursday where Cody and I, in our first ever full race together, ran a 2:04.46. Next up, Greg and I will be racing here in Ottawa this Saturday in a pretty stacked 1500m where we are hoping to get pulled along to a fast time.