BBC Radio Nottingham<\/a>.<\/p>\n“So we have a pick rate that we have to achieve – a target – and it’s fair to say that I repeatedly go over that target quite a lot. We did have a league table and my name used to be there quite a lot at the top.<\/p>\n
“At the time my colleagues didn’t know that I was a sprinter, only the management did. I pulled them to the side and said, ‘Look, you know, I have a little bit of an unfair advantage with this because of being a sprinter’. So I asked if it was possible to take me off the league table because it’s not fair.”<\/p>\n
While she knew she was quick “on the trolleys”, she “didn’t think much” of her chances of qualifying for the World Championships.<\/p>\n
“When I got the selection through, I was like, ‘Oh dear, I probably need to prepare’,” she laughed.<\/p>\n
“The heat training was probably harder than the training itself. Being stuck in a sauna at 40C for 70 minutes on a bike doing speed sessions was dreadful.<\/p>\n
“It was all just such a surreal experience.”<\/p>\n
The world-beating effort that Levitt produced in India was the high point in her meteoric rise as a disability athlete.<\/p>\n
She only took up sprinting seriously after a run of injuries – which included stretching a nerve in her ankle while competing in martial arts and a suffering a leg cut on a trail run – left her with permanent nerve damage in her leg.<\/p>\n
At every step of her recovery and transformation into an elite athlete, be it while working at Tesco or on the track, the runner says she has done it the “Victoria Levitt way”.<\/p>\n
“Every person’s gold medal is different,” Levitt said.<\/p>\n
“My gold medal is a gold medal but climbing the stairs independently might be someone’s gold medal, doing a Couch to 5k could be someone’s gold medal – again, it goes back to that message of ‘do it your way’.”<\/p>\n
Interviews conducted by BBC East Midlands Natalie Jackson and BBC Radio Nottingham’s David Jackson.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just a week after conquering the world in her sport, Levitt is back home in Mansfield and eager to get back to work – not just on the track with local running club Mansfield Harriers, but also the Christmas rush at Tesco and her other part-time job in administration at a disability charity. Her breakout […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21000,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-athletics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20999"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20999\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21001,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20999\/revisions\/21001"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}