Partnered with the trio of Grayson Marshall, Julien Turpin and Callum Wiss, Jacob Paillé would earn his first gold medal in track and field as part of the Lo-Ellen Park Intermediary 4 X 400m relay team back in the spring/summer of 2022.

Clocking in with a time of 4:01 or so, the foursome believed, at the time, they were pretty darn fast.

While his teammates would pursue sporting interests in football, basketball, paddling and nordic skiing as greater priorities over time, Paillé would begin his track career with the LEP Knights secondary school team one year later, more or less reliant on a healthy base of natural athleticism mixed in with a run of the mill commitment to training.

In his favourite event (400m), Paillé would finish a few strides back of both Dylan Nelson and Lukas Morin, though he would earn a trip to OFSAA 2023 via the Novice Boys 300m hurdles event.

The 400m final, however, remains a defining moment for the now 18 year-old who recently committed to the Windsor Lancers track and field program and entered the NOSSA championships this week coming off yet another three gold medal performance at cities.

“That race inspired me,” noted Paillé last weekend, his name inscribed again in the SDSSAA record books courtesy of the 400m hurdles senior boys race last week (56 seconds flat). “I wanted to win (in grade ten) so bad.”

It wasn’t just that one race that set the wheels in motion for the eldest of three children. The SDSSAA Track & Field gathering of 2023 also saw Paillé co-mingling with his best friend, Darren Joiner, and a handful of his teammates with the Air Blastoff Track Club.

Before long, Paillé was all in, leaving behind his love of hockey and dreams of playing for the Maple Leafs (most definitely a wise decision there) in favour of finding out exactly where his potential in track might lead.

“On the ice, everyone was always telling me I was fast, a good skater,” he said. “I think that may have helped transition to running.”

It wasn’t as though stretching out the legs and turning them over quickly was a new concept to the ultra-friendly young man who will be studying Civil Engineering in Windsor. “I would go out and run the occasional 5km, randomly, just out of nowhere,” said Paillé.

In grades nine and team, he was part of the Lo-Ellen cross-country squads – before shifting his focus far less on distance and far more on speed.

Reaching and holding peak speed is certainly do-able, for elite athletes, in the 100m and 200m dash. Stretch that out to 400 metres and the ask can be a little bit more tricky; but not for Jacob Paillé and those of his ilk.

“I feel like I sprint for most of the 400m,” he suggested. “There’s a part where I like to float, where I accelerate and then hold the speed and eventually pour it on down the stretch.”

For sprinters – and runners of all sorts, to be honest – that notion of “floating” is pure Zen.

“The back straightaway is usually when I float and you kind of see that I am very relaxed.”

Still, for as much as he has some nice speed in the 400m – he won gold last week with a time of 50.17 seconds – Paillé has enjoyed even more success in the long hurdles, an event that most would concede takes at least a year or two to fine-tune even a little from a technical standpoint.

“I wasn’t a good hurdler in grade nine,” said Paillé with a smile. “I was like a foot over the hurdles, which is not good at all.”

Enter coach Serena San Cartier, her name still sprinkled in the SDSSAA and NOSSA record books from her time at Lo-Ellen almost twenty years ago.

“I guess I have been gravitating a little more towards the hurdles because I feel that is the event I can do best at OFSAA,” said Paillé.

An all-around aggregate champion both in Sudbury and at the regional level, Paillé is competitive in a few different disciplines. That’s an attractive package for Windsor University coaches who are likely to see the nickel city product compete in the 300m and 600m events indoors (where there are no long hurdle races).

It’s a wonderful culmination to a few years of dedicated commitment to pursuing track excellence – largely borne out of the motivation that came from a third place finish.