Safe & Sound

I guess when you're 56, get up at 4:30 AM to leave at 5:30 AM, drive 3 hours and have a bar up 1/2 hour later, you shouldn't expect to feel great. Actually I arrived at 8:40 AM and had a bar up at 9 AM. Somehow again, I felt pretty good. I vaulted at a high level but was pretty inconsistent due to being too careful on my run and moving through poles and runs real fast. Today that is an acceptable excuse as I did not want to get hurt.

I started with a good jump on a pretty good sized 14' meet start pole (17.2) from 43' at 12' but it was promptly too small. That was a surprise as it felt stiff during warm up. I couldn't quite get in enough on the next pole so I moved back to 53' and had a couple of very good jumps at 12' 6". Moved up another pole and raised the bar to 13' and took four hit and miss jumps. On the next to the last one I had about 8" of height and the video looked good so I'll take that one. Two of the four were very good. Overall I got in eight total jumps on four poles and was on my regular meet poles. I haven't used those poles since Nationals in Wisconsin on 8/8, over two months ago. Most important I did not get hurt nor feel at risk.

I'll get back to regular training now and will jump again starting at a low level next Thursday. I've got to start pushing the sled running and working on moving big poles from a close run and extending up the pole much longer. I have a lot of refinement work to do but the "heavy lifting" is done. I feel excited about the home stretch to getting ready to jump.

If the meet were today I would not have been happy with my performance. I was pleased that I could quickly make the needed adjustments from vault to vault. I think that it's actually a good thing because it is a wake up call to what might go wrong in Sydney. The run, plant and take off were very good and that's really the most important part. The top end clean up is really me just hitting the pole harder when I'm not holding back on my run. Remember when I first moved to bigger poles and had a similar day? The next day I moved in a stride and hit them harder and all was well. So back to that plan.

Whew!! Sigh! Relief!! Bubba