Jane Saville Back in Australia

By Bidz Dela Cruz



Jane Saville, an Australian Olympian in race walking, is now back in her motherland for a month now. She hasn’t been race walking though because she is still recovering from a foot injury. At the moment she is swimming, together with a squad, 3 to 4 mornings a week with supplementary trainings from cycling around the panoramic hills along Sydney’s beautiful coast.

She enjoys swimming with a squad because of the social benefits she’s getting. Generally, Saville is highly sociable and loves to chat with friends and training mates. The only catch to her swim training is that it starts as early as 5AM, but she admits that it’s worth it, finishing training at around 7AM to find time for an extra hour of sleep.

While waiting for her foot to have a 100% recovery, she believes that her continuous cross training would be beneficial in maintaining basic fitness.  This could also make it easier for her to get back in fitness when I she race walk again.

Saville had already 6 weeks of rest from race walking and weight bearing training. She’s lucky not to have stress fracture, a good news she received from a recent bon scanning. She also had a better version of MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), better than what she had in Beijing, and it showed an inflammation around her tendon at the bottom of the shin (tendonitis). So she has to rest it for a little longer and get more treatment to loosen up the muscles in her shin and foot.



She is currently aiming at joining the HBA Great Australian Run on the 30^th of November, now that she knows the severity of her injury (or shall we say lightness). She plans to race walk there under her sponsor MBF (part of the HBA group) and will still be highly competitive, although she admits, given the results of her MRI, God-willing, if she participates, it will only be as a fun walker not a race walker.