Fourways runner overcomes injury
FOURWAYS – Fourways runner Jada van Staden may only be 15 years old but she's already overcome a number of obstacles to come out tops in the world of athletics.
Running around a 400m track at crazy speeds is nothing new to Fourways home-schooled learner, Jada van Staden.
At age 15 she already ran 54 seconds for the 400m race.
Jada has been a regular feature at not only local track and field meetings, but has competed at the annual national junior competitions since the age of 10 every year except for 2019. At the outset of the 2019 season she was side-lined with a foot injury. What started off as plantar fasciitis (inflammation of tissue on the bottom of the foot) and involved a moonboot, crutches and six months of rehabilitation ended up as a hip injury, later diagnosed as an avulsion fracture of the hip. After the hip problem was revealed, it was followed by another six months of rehab.
As an athlete Jada was not new to setbacks and fastidiously went about the process of getting back to the track in 2020. Her efforts paid off, and under the watchful eye of her coach at the University of Pretoria track in Pretoria, Nico van Heerden, she slowly started getting back to full strength.
Going into the 2020 season she had some early competitions including the opportunity to run at the Newton Shootout against South Africa’s top female athletes, including Caster Semenya.
At the recent Central Gauteng Championships, held at the UJ stadium in Auckland Park, Jada won two gold medals in the 400m hurdles and 100m hurdles respectively. In doing so she achieved the qualification standard for World Junior Championships which were to be hosted in Kenya later this year. Unfortunately, despite being one of the outright favourites for the Youth National title, the national meeting as well as Wold Junior Championships was cancelled due to Coronavirus.
Cancelled meetings and setbacks are part and parcel of reaching the top in your sport, and Jada won’t let this get her down but will keep training with her focus on her ultimate goal of becoming a professional athlete and to compete on the international stage including the Olympic Games and the World Athletics World Championships.
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