AT the end of a season that saw her complete her first marathon, win bronze medals at both the Commonwealth Games and IPC European Championships, and achieve her best-ever finish in the Bupa Great North Run, Middlesbrough Paralympian Jade Jones could be forgiven for taking things easy over the course of the next couple of months.

A holiday perhaps? Or maybe a chance to relax and unwind with family and friends? Not exactly. Instead, the 18-year-old is about to start a law course at Teesside University. Clearly, the greater the challenge, the more Jones is ready to take it on.

“I start university in a fortnight’s time,” said the teenager, who was born with a broken femur and persuaded to take up wheelchair racing thanks to a chance encounter with Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, who is now part of her coaching team. “I’m going to do law – I thought that if I was going to go to uni, I might as well go all out!

“So much has gone on this year that I’ve almost forgotten that everything’s going to change in the next two weeks. It’s going to be a challenge to organise my time, but there are a few other elite athletes doing a similar thing at Teesside.

“We’ve got Aimee (Willmott, who has recently switched training bases to London) and Karina (Le Fevre) who were both really successful at the Commonwealths, so we’ve got a little team going on, which is quite nice.”

While Jones’ academic career is about to go to a whole new level, her athletics exploits have already progressed to the very highest level of the sport.

A finalist in the 1,500m at the 2012 Paralympics, the North-Easterner travelled to the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow hoping to make her second major final in her preferred event.

She achieved the feat with a polished performance in the semi-final, before surprising even herself as she overcame some difficult wet conditions to power her way to a bronze medal behind Australia’s Angela Ballard in the final.

She followed up that medal with another over 5,000m at the European Championships, and stepped up in distance again to follow home Paralympic champion Shelly Woods in last weekend’s Bupa Great North Run.

“It’s been an absolutely incredible year,” said Jones. “The Commonwealths were the biggest surprise for me. I wanted top five, and I just kept on saying to my coach that if I could finish in the top five in the final, I’d be pleased with what I’d achieved.

“So to come out with a bronze medal was absolutely incredible. It was such an amazing experience and the atmosphere in the stadium was just brilliant – it was like London all over again.

“Having a day like that makes all the hard winter mornings worthwhile, and having the medals from the Commonwealths and Europeans gives me a really good platform to build from next year.

“We’ve got the World Championships next year, and that’ll be the focus of all the work through the winter, and then Rio isn’t exactly far off now either. I keep on talking about the next Olympics being two years away, but we’re actually at a point where it’s less than that now.”

Jones was only 16 when she made her Paralympic debut in London, so with another four years’ experience under her belt, she should head to Rio de Janeiro with a genuine medal chance in a little under two years’ time.

“It feels like it’s getting close now,” she said. “It only feels like yesterday when people were saying that London was only two years away, so it won’t be very long at all before Rio is actually happening. I don’t really know where those four years have gone, but it just shows how quickly time goes and another Olympic Games comes around.”

Jones is likely to prioritise the 1,500m in Rio, even though Sunday’s personal-best performance from Newcastle to South Shields underlined her ability to cope with much longer distances.

Having made her marathon debut on the streets of London this spring, she will start next season with another London Marathon appearance, with the endurance demands of such a gruelling event helping improve her performances on the track.

“Endurance always helps,” said Jones. “To be able to maintain your speed over a longer distance only helps when you return to the track and race there.

“In wheelchair racing, the speed we race at doesn’t really change no matter what the distance. It’s a bit more like cycling than running in that respect.

“It seems a bit crazy, but the speed just transfers over and when you’re doing a half-marathon, you’re not going that much slower than you would be over 1,500m. So racing in one should really help the other.”