A Quiet Day Off

I'm cool with this off day as it's pretty gloomy out. If it rains tomorrow I'll wait and try to go Monday since I have the luxury of a little extra time. Also my legs are still a little sore from the high level session I had on Thursday. Overall I feel great but rest is very important right now as your body makes 100% of its progress during rest. The objective is to ramp up your program to its highest intensity and then somewhere between 7-9 days out you pull the rug out from under the training load. Your body responds by coming back fast and hard because it thinks you will keep demanding training sessions. When you don't, it keeps building in anticipation that you will again shock it with more hard training. The result is that I should feel really good and refreshed on my jump day. Sometimes I do this a little too good. I've had a couple of big meets where I came out feeling so good that I almost got a strain in warm up. That's a good problem. I just have to remember to take it easy and start slow in the warm-up.

Warm-up for me is usually very early. I like to be the first on the runway about an hour out from the start time. This way I'm not rushed and few vaulters are on the runway yet. I feel better the second time around anyway - more quick, so sitting afterward warm-up is actually pretty good for me. I also stop my warm-up one two jumps before I feel I am actually really warmed up. This saves the bigger jumps for later. Because I will have to wait around awhile to vault, I will actually do my real warm-up during the meet. I tend to start on a medium sized pole that I don't have to push my run to get in on. Each vault I move up a pole, back a stride or both as I warm up and progress through poles during the meet.

I'm comfortable and confident to the degree that I can be right now. I'm trying to load up on work stuff to keep my mind away from the trip as it helps quell the anxiety. I heard from Tom Rauscher (M60) that he too is healthy so that was our main goal. He is scheduled to jump on our pit with our group. When this happens the results are split out and reported separately after the fact. This will give us 18 guys in our group which is quite a lot. They will probably start around 8' and I will start at 12' so I will be sitting around for awhile and I have planned accordingly. Phillip says we could start with one wind condition and end with a totally different direction as the day goes by. I HATE to warm-up with a tailwind and then come in two hours later into a headwind. If it happens I'll be fine but MAN would that suck. As they say, everyone else has to deal with it too.

That's it for now. Thanks for being here and have a great Saturday! Bubba