Levins hits reset button after foot surgery
Canada’s Cam Levins was famous for his extreme mileage, running three times a day and covering as many as 300 kilometres a week.
But around this time last year, the 28-year-old from Black Creek, B.C., was limited to five minutes of running, every few days.
Levins is rebounding from foot surgery that sidelined him for virtually all of last season, and will make his half-marathon debut at the Toronto Waterfront Marathon on Oct. 22. It’s another step toward his goal of running a full marathon next year, and part of a long road back to full health.
“It was definitely tough going from essentially pretty good fitness and full mobility to having surgery and being stuck on crutches and unable to do anything. And then starting back running, running five minutes at most, that was very, very difficult for me.
“It’s definitely nice to be where I am now, and I know I still have a ways to go, but I’m having a good time being able to (run) at all. In some regards, this is a reset button on my career.”
Levins was one of Canada’s top distance runners. He won both the 5,000 and 10,000 metres at the NCAA championships in 2012, won bronze in the 10,000 metres at the 2014 Commonwealth Games, and broke the Canadian 10,000metre record in 2015.
But a freak accident at the 2015 Canadian championships ruined his left ankle and wiped out much of the 2016 and ’17 seasons. He fell at the finish line of the 1,500 metres when another runner plowed into him from behind.
The nagging injury bothered him for months, and then tests on his foot in the summer of 2016 finally revealed a torn peroneal tendon, stress fractures in his navicular and talus bones, a bone spur and bone chips.
Recovering from surgery, and still on crutches, he barely watched the Rio Olympics.
“The Olympics were difficult for me, just being in the situation where I was like ‘I’m on crutches, I can’t do anything,’” Levins said. “I envied people being able to run at all, so to watch others being able to do what I like was difficult.”
He was finally able to resume running — in frustrating five-minute spurts — in November.
Levins recently left the Nike Oregon Project, where he trained with British star Mo Farah under coach Alberto Salazar. While he and his wife Elizabeth, a pharmacist, still live in Portland, his college coach Eric Houle at Southern Utah University is now writing his workouts. Together, Levins and Houle have amped the mileage back up — he’s resumed his gruelling three-runs-a-day regime — and have added a greater emphasis on weightlifting.
Levins said he’d always planned on attempting a marathon, and Jerome Drayton’s 42-year-old Canadian record — the oldest on the books — is certainly appealing.
“I would love it,” Levins said. “It just depends on what sort of shape I’m in going into it, but yeah, that certainly will be on my radar.”
He’s targeting the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon next October to make his debut in that distance. If all goes well “that could change the course of my career,” Levins said.