Call him the record breaker.

LCCVI Runner Cody Bell is making his mark on the track scene, smashing records as he goes.

The Grade 10 student broke both the 100 metre and the 800 metre ambulatory records at SWOSSA recently. An amazing feat considering just a year ago Bell was still running on his regular prosthesis.

Bell lost the lower part of his left leg in a lawn mower accident when he was just three. It didn’t slow him down too much.

When he got to high school, his  family – all runners including Ryan Bell who is on the LCCVI track team – encouraged Cody to sign up. In Grade 9, he started the season on his “regular” leg. Midway through the season, War Amps helped the family buy a $15,000 running leg and Bell began to fly.

“The other leg wasn’t meant for running,” Bell tells The Independent adding it often hurt him as he ran. “This is a lot better. I feel I am going faster. It’s comfortable and I’m going faster and I like how I felt going faster.
“I could actually do the running now, I was smoother and I could feel I was faster.”

This year, Bell has put in extra time training with the track team and it has paid off. Thursday he ran the 100 metres in 14.7 seconds breaking the SWOSSA record by one-tenth of a second.

But the bigger accomplishment was the 800 metre where he set a personal best and shattered the old record by five seconds with a time of 2:57.22.

Bell, who is recovering from a knee injury, hopes to spend more time on the track leading up to OFSSA the first weekend in June. While he’s been responsible for some regional records falling, he’s not sure that will happen at OFSSA.

The 100 metre ambulatory record is 12.08, almost three seconds off his last time and he doubts he can break it. The record for the 800 metre is 2:43.