While most Olympic and Paralymic athletes lose focus the year after competing on the world’s biggest stage, Jessica Lewis is staying fully committed.

With a world championships in New Delhi, India, to look forward to in late September, Lewis is gearing up her training and competed in Switzerland last week at the Nottwil Grand Prix.

Lewis won the T53 200 metres and finished third in the 100 and 400 metres before recording a personal best a few days later in the longer distance at a smaller meet in Switzerland.

With the PB signalling that her training for that event is going well, Lewis was still a little disappointed with her efforts in the 100 metres.

“I executed the races well, especially the 400 metres, Lewis said.

“We’ve been trying different techniques because we’re still trying to build up my endurance for that race. We broke it down into different 100 metres and what speeds I should be holding during that time and it all worked out really well.

“For the 100 metres we are still working on trying to figure out how to get faster in the last 50 metres when my size is a bit of a hindrance to picking up the speed, so for that we’ve learnt a lot on what we can change, whether that is my seating position or the angle at which I’m putting the win.

“Going into the meet I had pretty high expectations of myself, which made it a little harder when I wasn’t meeting those time in the 100 metres, but it is still the beginning of the year and conditions were not the best.

“In my first 100 metres race in Nottwil I did manage a 16.3, which was close to my PB so I was happy to start with that and we can only go up from here.”

Part of being an elite athlete is dealing with the emotions that come from performances below expectation but Lewis is now experienced enough to not let one bad race become the catalyst for changing her process.

“It is all about taking it one race at a time and you have to tell yourself that just because you’ve had one bad race you are not going to continually have bad races,” Lewis said.

“It’s just about focusing on what you can change for the next race, taking what I’ve learnt from the way that I executed the race before and then focusing on things I can change.

“My coach and I have talked about the fact we need to have race amnesia, so when it goes bad you can forget it, take any positives and move forward.“

Lewis’s motivation remains strong ahead of her trip to India to compete at another world championships and she is looking forward to working hard in the build-up to an event in a country she has never competed in.

“I definitely am motivated because we lucked out and have a world championships this year,” she said.

“That gives me something to work towards and if we hadn’t then it would have probably been more of a struggle, but I’m really excited with how well my training has gone and I’m looking forward to the next block and diving deeper and improving.

"I’ve never been to India before so I’m really excited and I’m going with the Canadian team for their training camp in Dubai before that.

“I will be competing at Canadian Nationals in Ottawa and they now call me ‘the honorary Canadian’ but the support they have given me is amazing. I’m very fortunate to be able to work with them and it’s been an awesome experience.”