Jude Wheeler-Dee was a multi-sport athlete growing up in Kingston, competing in basketball and soccer as well as Track. Whichever the season was, Wheeler-Dee said, he had a sport to play.

Wheeler-Dee said that playing in the NBA was his dream when he was younger, but as he grew older, and especially during the COVID-19 lockdown when it was the only sport he could do uninterrupted, he gravitated more toward running.

After choosing Queen's for academic reasons, Wheeler-Dee got in contact with Queen's Cross Country and Distance Track Head Coach Mark Bomba and joined the team. A local athlete, Wheeler-Dee also knew a lot of the names on the team before joining.

After a promising first season with the team in 2021-22, Wheeler-Dee had an excellent 2022-23 athletic year. Wheeler-Dee picked up a podium in the regular season in Cross Country before helping the Gaels earn an OUA silver medal with a First Team All-Star performance, and a U SPORTS bronze medal.

Wheeler-Dee then earned two gold medals at the OUA Track & Field Championships (Men's 1,000 metres and 1,500 metres) and was named the OUA Men's Track MVP. He finished the year with a gold medal performance in the Men's 1,000 metres at the U SPORTS Track & Field Championship.

Wheeler-Dee sat down with GoGaelsGo.com to share more about himself on and off the race course.



What does your off-season training routine look like?
 
After indoor season we take a week or two off, very low key. And then for the next month or so, we had been doing a lot of base-building and trying to get a good foundation because right now we're in the middle of our outdoor season. So right now, the intensity is definitely ramping up and we're getting ready to run fast. Once this wraps up, we'll go back to having a couple of weeks off and then getting ready for the fall. Most of August will be a lot of long miles and slower paces, but making a big foundation so once we do start to ramp up and get the intensity higher, it comes a bit more naturally.
 
What do you like to do in the summer?
 
Summer is great because I had a bunch of people in high school that I was really close with, and now that they are all in different places, summer is a good time to connect with them. I'm a big fan of being outside and playing sports. Playing pick up Frisbee or Spike Ball, going down to the pier and even just having lunch on a patio and getting to see people I haven't seen in a long time is definitely something I look forward to the most.
 
What are you most looking forward to when you get back on campus?
 
In terms of being a student-athlete, it really is the amount of bodies that are back in relation to the team. We have a great group of people out at the moment, and there are some people who decided to stay in Kingston for the summer, which is really good for training, but also as a community. But nothing's better than going up for a practice and having 30-plus bodies, men and women, to talk to and warm up with. That's one thing that I really enjoy about our team, we don't just have a Men's Team and a Women's Team, we all congregate together. You can be doing warm up with guys you'll be racing with or you can be doing warm up with some of the female athletes that you don't get to talk to as often. Definitely everyone being back and having that big team aspect is definitely what I'm looking forward to the most.
 
What is your favourite place on campus? And in Kingston?
 
On campus, I'm a big fan of the first floor on Stauffer Library when it comes to studying because it's maybe one of the louder studying spots on campus, but I do enjoy that. That and CoGro. I found when it's too quiet, it's a bit difficult for me to study, so the first floor at Stauffer can get a little rowdy sometimes, but that's kind of what I enjoy.
 
And in Kingston, Juniper is great. It's 10-15 minute walk from my place and it's right by the water, and get a coffee and lunch.
 
What's your favourite team memory?
 
One that comes to mind, usually with races women race first then men race second. At the Bayfront Invitational this year they went men first and then women second. That was really good because usually when the women are running, we have to focus on our race and we're warming up and don't really get the chance to cheer for the rest of our team. But because we raced first, we didn't have to any of that. 
 
It was really fun. The course was a loop that they did four times, so all of us were running back and forth to all these different spots, cheering them on, because that's not something we really get to do that often. That was definitely one of my favorite memories of last season.
 
What's your pre-race ritual and how did it come about?
 
Something that we started implementing last year and throughout this year, is the ten-minute mile in the morning before a race. And it's really just what it sounds like, you do a mile in 10 minutes as a shake out. It's a really slow and comfortable pace, we've done it before with Miles [Brackenbury's] cousins who are ten years old and were okay with the pace, it's meant to be really slow. 
 
We came up with it because Mark, before he was a coach, he was a national runner and had a really long and fruitful career, so he tells us a bunch of stories about athletes he's raced against. One of them, Kevin Sullivan, an Olympian and mile record holder for Canada, one of the things Mark told us, before a race, Kevin came up to Mark and told him how he did a ten-minute mile for his warm up. So it's something that we're like, one of the best runners in Canada did this, maybe we start doing it.
 
What's your favourite pre-race meal and why?
 
The night before, I don't really have anything in particular, but I do enjoy a little pizza. I think a lot of people, when they think of pre-race meals, think of pasta and something that they deem a bit healthier. But pizza has everything you need, it has the carbs and you can have protein on it. 
 
I used to think that I had to have pasta the night before and I'd have to have this as breakfast and I had to eat two hours out for my race. But the more I've raced, the more I realize that stuff doesn't really matter too much. And I don't want that stuff to get in my head and give doubt that if I don't do something, then it's going to affect my race. And I think pizza is a great example of that, that's something that people have as comfort food and it does just fine the day before a race.
 
What do you hope to accomplish next season, both individually and as a team?
 
Individually I definitely want to pick up where I've left off. There's still a bunch I want to do in this sport, but the more important aspect for me at the moment is continue to develop the culture of this team. We're still a pretty young team and we've had many conversations, Miles, Roman [Mironov] and myself, even Mark, about how we want to see success now but it's also important to us that we see success five, ten years down the line, even when we're gone. So trying to create the standard and have a culture of athletes that, when we leave, continues and five, ten years down the road, this team continues to see success. On an individual level, trying to be that example is important to me. 
 
On a team level, just looking at next year, we're looking to compete at the highest level and this will hopefully be the first year that we'll really compete for the national championship. I know it's on a lot of our minds, but we also want to keep the focus on progression and not success. If we do that and we put the pressure on guys to be consistent and to put the work in every day, then the success we want to see will be a byproduct of that.
 
So we have big goals, but it's more about all these little goals and these little battles every day, that's the really important thing for us at the moment.