Jess Wilton, a CCCU Sports Scholar specialising in Race Walking has recently come 5^th in the 2024 World Athletics Race Walking Tour. Jess competed in the under 20 Women’s 10km race, with an impressive time of 55:36. Jess walked her way from local races all the way to sharing the track with Olympians in the World Championships. The question is – how did Jess get into this graceful yet intense sport?

Jess was an athletic child, competing in swimming, shooting and the modern pentathlon, when one day, due to the fact she was a great endurance runner, her coaches at Ashford Athletic Club asked her to try out racewalking in order to get more points for club in the Kent Young League. Jess came to learn she had a talent for the sport, so when COVID hit and it was harder to train for pentathlons, she shifted to race walking. Four and a half years later and she is now a thriving Sport Scholar at Canterbury Christ Church University studying Primary Education.

There are two main rules to race walking, when your foot hits contact with the floor your knee has to be straight, and you also have to have one foot on the ground at all times. Although it may look easy, it’s no walk in the park!

Jess, training with Ashford Athletics, attends two training sessions involving endurance and long distance as well as taking part in park runs for the social aspect. In total, she does about 15km a week. She also completes the rest of her training at CCCU, using the University’s state of the art technology, facilities and expert training.

Her personal best for 3km is 15:06 minutes and for 5km, 25:20 minutes. At the ripe age of 19 she also made a remarkable time of 55:36 at the World Championships. Jess discussed her thoughts on the training, “It is tough, involving a lot of long distance and endurance as the race distance goes all the way from 3km up to 20km. At the moment, I’m between 3-10km but focusing more on 10km going up to 20km.”

On her road to the World Championships in Dublin, Jess travelled around the UK taking part in national and international competitions. In 2022, she was invited to Belfast and competed in an international competition on the same team as Olympic athlete Phoebe Gill. More recently, Jess competed and won the Summer Nationals in 2024, being awarded a highly sought after teddy, which she described when talking about the day to be, “better than a medal” with it being her biggest achievement yet.

After a successful year, Jess made it to the World Race Walking Tour, however the weather was not in her favour. The winds were strong, however Jess continued on to reach 10km, when she looked back on that day she commented, “Dublin was one of the best places I’ve competed” … “It was amazing, the people I got to see racing there and the atmosphere was good, but it was just seeing some people I’ve watched in Paris being there and knowing I’d race at the same time as them.”

With a successful start to her Race-Walking journey, securing a place in the top 5 at the World Championships with an exceptional time of 55:36, the CCCU Sport Scholar aims to compete in more international competitions in the future, with hopes to ultimately score a place onto a GB team, hoping someday to make it to the Olympics.