Hannah Dederick Showcased Her Racing Range At The Parapan American Games

No American track and field athlete performed better at November’s Parapan American Games in Santiago, Chile, than Hannah Dederick.

Dederick competed in five races and finished on the podium in all five. She dominated the field and set a Parapan Am record in the 100-meter T54 with a finishing time of 16.19 seconds, more than a second faster than the record she set four years ago in Lima, Peru.

Dederick won gold in the 400 T53-54 by almost 2.5 seconds and added another in the 1,500 T54. A silver in the 800 T54 and a bronze in the universal 4x100 relay rounded out her Chilean experience.

Dederick, who turned 21 while competing in Santiago, was 16 when she made her first Parapan Ams team in 2019.

“My training has gotten a lot more intense … a lot more structured,” she said of the last four years.

In 2021, after the Tokyo Paralympics, where she finished just off the podium in fourth in the 100, Dederick left her hometown of Seattle and moved to Champaign, Illinois, to train and compete with the famed wheelchair track team at the University of Illinois. She is a sports management major at Illinois in the middle of her junior year.

Dederick credits the social aspect of training with her peers with taking her training to the next level.

“I feel like I’ve gotten the environment, the training, that I’ve needed to be in,” Dederick said. “I really have been able to surround myself in a racing community and I’m able to surround myself with athletes who love racing, who would dedicate their lives to racing.”

Dederick is already a versatile racer, able to excel both at sprints and at longer, more tactical distances. Her favorite race in Santiago was the 1,500.

“I normally don’t do the 1,500,” she said. “I (was) able to showcase what my strength is, and it’s outsprinting my distance competition.”

In 2023, Dederick added marathon training to her already extensive schedule and competed at both the Chicago and New York City marathons this fall. In April, she will compete in the Boston Marathon. She said she viewed her marathoning as the first step in what she hopes will be a long career like that of her training partner Susannah Scaroni and other professional marathoners like Tatyana McFadden.

“You don’t normally get to train with and learn from people who are developed in the sport like Susannah,” Dederick said. “I’m so grateful that I get to see her and train with her every single day. And learn from her each and every day.”

Chicago, Dederick said, was her favorite race of this past marathon season.

“I just love Chicago, the city of Chicago. It feels homey,” she said. “It’s a fast course. And it’s a great marathon to be able to work with different techniques, it’s not too hard.”

She hopes to return to the Chicago Marathon, if not for 2024, then in the future.

For the short term, Dederick will focus on being a sprinter, but hopes to develop into a marathoner.

“It takes a long, long, long time to build up into a marathoner,” she said. “I’m still young in the sport, and I still love learning what the sport is.”

Dederick does credit the training she puts in for marathons with boosting her sprints to the next level, including in Santiago. She hopes to get even faster following the buildup to Boston and into what will be a busy 2024 season between nationals, world championships, the U.S. Paralympic Team Trials and the Paralympics themselves.

Looking ahead to 2024, Dederick said that she will train primarily for shorter distances — maxing out at the 800 — once her spring marathon training ends in April. Her focus will be on the track, not the roads, but she said she does occasionally train on the roads even when heading into track season.

“The most important part is going to be … keeping up with the training intensity all year,” Dederick said. “To be able to be at my peak in July and be ready to race at my max to make this Paralympic team.”

And beyond all that intense training?  She acknowledges that her focus on Paris will be all-consuming, but she wants to find a hobby.

Dederick said her resolution for 2024 is “to find something I love doing outside of racing and getting an education.”

Lela Moore is a freelance contributor to usparatf.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.