Multi-time Paralympic and World Champion Brent Lakatos provides a look at his training alongside his wife, the now retired British Paralympian Stef Reid; his journey to Loughborough University; and his aims for 2024.
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Set… Go. The journey of my career has really been all over the place. I grew up in Canada. I started in wheelchair basketball; transitioned to racing for a while.
I was living and working in the US and then my wife, who is a British athlete, she started training out of the HiPac right here. And so in the lead up to London [2012] she was spending months at a time over here… I was living in the US
And we finally decided this is really hard on our marriage. And so I’m just going to move over. So I moved over here in 2013… been here ever since. It’s great having a spouse involved in the sport. When we were both competing, we weren’t training as much together as we are now.
We’d have different training camps. We’d go to different competitions. But somebody who understands the highs and the lows is important. And now that she’s retired, she’s taking up triathlon part time and she’s actually the best training partner I’ve ever had. And so Stef goes out on her bike and as you see…
We’ll do a workout together and she’ll pull me around the track. I’ll get in her draft and and I’ll be able to go faster do better, higher quality training because Stef’s helping me I do have lots of medals
And if you look at them throughout my career, most of them come in the second half or last third. And so I think the secret is I’ve always been experimenting and with new things, with new equipment, with new training. And so I was steadily improving throughout my career.
And once I started medalling, then I kept on medalling and you know, the colours started getting better and stuff like that. And so the secret is never really just to become complacent, just to keep on an experimenting and trying new things. I kind of did retire.
I took a lot of time off and I decided to come back because I wasn’t too happy with the way Tokyo went. I didn’t quite end it the way I wanted to end my career. And so I’ve come back with the hopes of going to Paris and winning gold.