500 Days

Today marks 500 days until the start of the London 2012 Paralympic Games. I was hoping to celebrate today with two new personal best performances, but due to a freak injury where I just stood up and found I couldn’t weight bear on my ‘good’ ankle, I haven’t been able to race.

A week on and I’m still unable to walk pain free. I have no swelling, full movement and no sore points, which is all very confusing. The only abnormal thing is that I have a clicking sound when I walk. I saw the doctor on Friday and he suspects tendonitis, but I will get this confirmed when I visit my physio on Wednesday. Of course you can never get an appointment when you need one!

I am pretty gutted about not being able to race, but I need to try and keep a positive mental attitude. This is just another hurdle of many I need to jump before making my ultimate dream a reality. It’s going to take something extremely dramatic before I give up. Injuries heal, guide runners can be replaced.

Possibly tomorrow, or hopefully sometime next week the qualification standards will be released. I’m excited and nervous about this, excited because I’ll know exactly what I’m aiming for, but apprehensive because they might be out of my reach. Earlier this week the events were announced and luckily for me there is female T11 100m and 200m, along with a mixed class F11/12 long jump. I still haven’t tried out the long jump; nevertheless believe it might be my best chance of qualifying because we have no F11/12 long jumper in Great Britain.

Here are my qualification predictions, let’s see how accurate I am-
100m B standard 14.8secs, A standard 14.0secs
200m B standard 30.5secs, A standard 29.5secs
Long Jump B standard 2.80m, A standard 3.20m

I can do this!