Lucy Hadaway: Part-time York long jumper who puts physio patients first heading to Commonwealth Games

For 26-year-old Hadaway, a part-time long jumper, had secured the qualifying standard for the Commonwealth Games at the last attempt and was waiting for a call from Team England’s athletics chief to let her know whether it was enough to earn her selection for the Games in Glasgow later this month.

“I had to keep telling my patients, ‘I'm so sorry, I might have to just take a phone call during this’,” she recalls. “’But it is important, it’s whether or not I got into the Commonwealth Games’.”

And Team England made her wait. Hadaway has enjoyed a breakout year in an otherwise injury-and illness-hit athletics career, winning the British titles at both indoor and outdoor championships, but still she didn’t know if it would be enough.

By the time the call finally came, confirming she was one of 63 athletes from England and three from her club at City of York bound for Scotland, she had almost given up hope.

“It was quite late at night in the end. I was on my sofa with the dog when the call came in,” she says. “I’d not been targeting the Commonwealths so it came as a nice surprise.”

Even after the 2026 she has had, competing at the biggest event of her life is a bonus.

But that is just how Hadaway approaches her athletics career. It is not the be all and end all for her; it is something she loves and wants to make the most of while she can.

She has been through many ups and downs, not least a bout of glandular fever that she got from her younger sister in 2023 which took 18 months to overcome and threatened to cut short her athletics career before she could even call it a prime. It was still something she was managing on the eve of the British Indoor Championships earlier this year, meaning she has a different perspective to most athletes.

For one thing, her job is hugely important to her. “I absolutely adore all my patients and I just love helping them all,” says Hadaway, whose work includes clinic hours and home visits.

While the majority of long jumpers she will compete against at the Commonwealth Games are full-time athletes, Hadaway spends most of her time prioritising others.

“My work is very physical. I'll be teaching people to walk again, that means I am lifting their whole body weight and getting them to stand,” she explains.

“Most of the athletes aren't going to be doing that during the weeks leading up to a competition. They are relaxing, chilling, taking it easy, just doing little sessions.”

Not only that, but she spends countless hours a week behind the wheel of her car.

“Most people refer to my week as chaos. I say it's controlled chaos,” smiles Hadaway, who lives in Thorpe Willoughby, equidistant between the commute along the A63 to work in Leeds, and the journey up to York along the A19 for training.

“I’m back and forth between clinic sessions in Leeds, home to walk the dog, back to clinic in Leeds, then shooting through to York for a training session.

“I’ve done 31,000 miles in a year.”

To emphasise just how busy she is, she will work her last physiotherapy session on the Sunday after the Games have opened two days earlier, then head up to Glasgow to compete in the qualifying round on Friday, July 31, and hopefully the final the following day before returning to work within days.

It is a job that also gives her an advantage though. If ever she is injured – of which there is a long back catalogue – Hadaway can effectively fix herself.

“It's handy sometimes,” she laughs. “It actually helps a lot of other physios because I can just talk them through like, oh, I think it's like X, Y and Z.

“Some injuries I just fix myself.”

There have been some setbacks, though, that Hadaway couldn’t fix herself.

She had been a heptathlete in her youth at the City of York Athletics Club, the only club she has known, when it was actually a fall executing a long jump that triggered an unfortunate chain of events.

“I broke my foot and had to have screws put in,” she explains. “Then slipped on my crutches, and dislocated my shoulder, so that kind of took out hurdling and shot putt, which were my other two specialties.

“That is when the long jump took over. It was what I enjoyed the most, but wasn't even what I was best at at the time. Growing up, I wasn't one of those amazing athletes that really stood out. I just kind of kept going through the process, kept turning up and kept competing.”

That mentality took her to the Commonwealth Youth Games in 2017 where she won bronze, but she missed out on the senior Commonwealths in Birmingham four years ago due to another injury.

“I was very sad to miss Birmingham. I had a bad knee injury,” she remembers. “I had a bit of my kneecap break off and it stuck into my tendon.

“I already had the qualifying distance that year, but then I had to pull out and stop all competition. I was quite sad to have missed that home Games.

“But I'm quite good with injuries – I've had a fair few of them now. It hurts at first, but I move on. You can't change it. Just use it and work towards next season, next goals, and just carry on forward.”

But it was in the following winter that glandular fever struck, laying her low for nearly two competitive seasons.

“When I first started to recover from it, I couldn't stand up without getting really dizzy,” she begins. “I couldn't walk the dog without putting myself back in bed for a couple of days. I thought that was me done. I’d been on confirmation funding from UK Sport but they couldn’t continue backing me and I don’t blame them.

“But again, I was like, it is what it is. We'll take each day as it comes. Keep moving forward and just see. So I started getting bits back of training. And I was like, well, I might not be able to compete again, but I'm doing some exercise.”

Hadaway started competing again last summer, but could only do three or four of the six jumps because of the fatigue she was still suffering. Even by the time the British Indoor Championships in Birmingham rolled around in February, she was still not 100 per cent.

“I decided to do that three, four days before I competed. I hadn't trained for three weeks,” she explains.

“I went into the indoor champs with zero expectations. I'm just jumping for the fun of it and came first. I would have loved to have had a bigger distance, but given how little training I’d done, I was very happy and shocked.”

Her summer has been similar, getting the Commonwealth Games standard with her last jump and then rocking up to the outdoor British Championships again in Birmingham with little expectation or pressure, and walking away with the title.

She may yet get a third trip to the second city in August with the European Athletics Championships heading to the Alexander Stadium. The qualifying standard is 6.77m. Hadaway’s season’s best is an agonising two centimetres short.

There might be another chance to try and force her way into the Great Britain squad at the Diamond League meeting at London’s Olympic Stadium in two weeks’ time.

If she gets to Birmingham, life is unlikely to slow down. She is due to move house the day after the long jump competition.

Given her propensity this year to pull out big jumps when the chips are down, it would be foolish for any opponent – or even herself – to rule out her doing something life-changing in the long jump pit this summer.

If she does, will it change her priorities? Would she put her job on hold to take a leap of faith in athletics?

“If I did get a double medal this year, or something really special, I would probably drop back a bit, but I don't think I could ever stop seeing my treatment patients,” says Hadaway. “It's part of the reason why I said I want to be a physio. I just want to keep helping them.”

Long term, Hadaway is targeting the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028.

She believes she can get there while training just 10/11 hours a week and continuing to do the job she loves.

And if she doesn’t?

“Again, my life motto is, it is what it is. If I go to Glasgow and things maybe don't go right, or I don't get to go back on world-class funding, it's just okay, right.

“I just keep doing what I'm doing this year and keep progressing, and just carry on the same next year.”