Blake scott red wedge sandals how to#

In April, he set new American records for a double below-knee amputee in the 100m (11.31 seconds), 200m (21.98) and 400m (51.97), earning the U.S. He’s been living at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, Calif., since 2010, taking two years off from college to focus on the upcoming Paralympic Games in London. “And Blake doesn’t do anything quietly.”Ĭruz’ patience is paying huge dividends, but so is Leeper’s dedication. “Until about four months ago, Blake was throwing up during every workout-he would go so hard on the first interval and then throw up over and over again,” Cruz says followed by a long pause and a smile. It took a while to mold Leeper into shape, but he’s made huge progress in a short amount of time. “I wanted to impress Coach Cruz and go as hard as I could on every repeat,” Leeper laughs.

Blake scott red wedge sandals how to#

When a workout was supposed to be five 200m repeats with a moderate rest interval, Leeper had no idea how to pace himself and simply ran as fast as he could. He tried that tactic on the track, but dearly paid the price. During his basketball days, he went all-out all the time. At the beginning, Leeper was undertrained, not entirely motivated and, as a result, a bit lost. He feels it takes a track athlete six to eight years to really learn how to train correctly. Blake was more interested in meeting girls and having fun than running track.”įortunately, Cruz is a patient man. “Was it 80 percent? Or 50 percent? At least he was honest. “I’d ask him to tell me what percentage of the workouts he had actually done,” Cruz says. Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, Calif., though, there was no hiding his lack of conditioning. Then he took second in the 200m, and I was like, ‘whoa, this kid is special.’ I could tell right away that Blake had something the other kids didn’t.”Īfter the meet in Brazil, Cruz started emailing workouts to Leeper-who was then studying applied physics the University of Tennessee with the hopes of developing high-performance prosthetics-but Leeper wasn’t very good about doing them. He took third in the 100m on just raw talent.

“It was his first time out of the country and he was scared. “We met for the first time on that trip,” Cruz remembers. Cruz, a two-time Olympic medalist at 800m and one of the world’s most decorated track athletes of the 1980s, knew Leeper was a diamond in the rough, but he also knew Leeper’s talents would be lost without proper training or dedication. Paralympic track and field team since 2005. It also landed him in the capable hands of Joaquim Cruz, the coach of the U.S. Paralympic track team that would be competing in an international meet in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil where he’d truly start to realize the potential of his emerging talent. Those performances earned him a spot on the U.S. He blitzed the 100m field that day in 11.95 seconds and also went on to win the 200m (25.44) and the 400m (56.79) in the same afternoon. “Being my first track meet, my main goal was not falling down and making that 14-hour drive back home a whole lot longer.” “My main concern was not disappointing my family,” he admits. All he knew is that he wanted to run fast. Not only had he never run in a track meet before, Leeper had never seen one in person. “We saw that the Endeavor Games were coming up so the thought was ‘Go big or go home,’” Leeper recalls. Although he had been using prosthetics since he was 9 months old, he was never the type of kid to ease into anything. Leeper was born without feet, ankles and lower leg bones, and had his legs amputated to the knee shortly after he was born.

He had played basketball and baseball as a kid and even played varsity basketball in high school, but it wasn’t until he received a pair of top-of-the-line prosthetic running legs, courtesy of the Challenged Athletes Foundation and the manufacturer, a small Icelandic company called Ossur, that track and field ever crossed Leeper’s radar. Leeper, along with his mom, dad and older brother, had driven 14 hours from their home in Church Hill, Tenn., to Edmund, Okla., to see if he had a future in this new sport. The 19-year-old double below-knee amputee had traveled 950 miles to get to the 2009 Endeavor Games, but he had no idea at the time the 100 meters that lay in front of him offered the opportunity to take him on an even greater journey. Three years ago, under the hot Oklahoma sun, Blake Leeper crouched down in his starting blocks with something to prove. 22-year-old American Paralympian Blake Leeper is on a fast track to sprinting success.