Vaulting in the Big Leagues

Hello, again.  It’s me, the resident old fart.  Won’t that girl graduate already?

Usually I feel like the spring semester flies by, but this fall semester FLEW BY.  My first semester at UMass Amherst is complete, now I’m just anxiously awaiting my grades.

My first semester here was pretty interesting.  I was so used to my safety net of professors and mentors at UMass Lowell that I forgot how I got one in the first place: TALKING! COMMUNICATION!  I was convinced one of my professors hated me after getting pulled aside by my coach for midterm evaluations.  Apparently, she thought I was slacking and I wasn’t doing as well as I thought I was.  I put off talking to her until Thanksgiving break–it was a complete misunderstanding.  She was convinced that I wasn’t interested in the material (although, a class that strictly reads memoirs about coping with death can get a little redundant…and just boring), while I was convinced she hated everything about me.  Of course it was a misunderstanding, because I’m a lovely person.  It does take much more effort to talk to the professor at bigger schools, and I’ve never had a Teaching Assistant before so that was new to me as well.  I don’t hate it because some of them were very good looking…

It took some getting used to taking classes in huge lecture halls and trying to stay focused.  One of my classmates needed a American Sign Language interpreter…well, I should learn sign language because the first few weeks of the semester I watched the interpreter more than I listened to the professor.  I guess I didn’t realize how much the language relied on facial expression like spoken English.  That’s completely beside the point—but I taught myself how to refocus in a lecture hall.

I have also gotten used to training with other people again, haha.  It’s way more fun.  It was a realization I had one competition practice we had.  I cheered them on.  It was like a lightbulb, “OH…I have teammates?!”   I haven’t had other female vaulters on a team since…well, never.  Well, maybe for a few weeks outdoor my freshman year in high school when one of the girls wanted to vault—but then that girl quit.  (suckerrr!) I love my lady vaulters and it feels really nice to actually have other girls to train with.  We have a lot of fun at practice.

It’s kind of weird to read everyone’s posts about competing already at meets that I’ve competed in years past.  We are no where close to competing and they changed the location of that meet already…so I’m not even sure what I’m doing.  (haha, what else is new?)  I’m itching to compete, but I know that I’m nowhere ready.  There’s still a lot to work on, but I do feel stronger and faster than ever. I know this because none of my clothes fit.  I’m sure this with translate over into my vaulting eventually with higher heights, hopefully.

For now, I have until January 4th off to spend time with family and friends and work out on my own.  Then we come back for winter training.  Nothing but eat, sleep, and track.  It’s my favorite time of the year.  I can’t wait to train and hang out with the team without the stress of academics.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS EVERYONE!  Can’t wait to see you guys at meets soon!

Aww  Heyy!

Long time no post, my bad on that. But now it’s 2am during finals period, and I am in desperate need of a distraction from my studying marathon, so time for an update! The rest of the summer I was so excited about ended on a very… uh… a very… well it ended on a note. It wasn’t what I was hoping for, not even close. However I did manage to really improve a lot of pieces in my vault and I was lucky enough to get more with the club overall with things like the beach vault and the Halloween vault. If you haven’t made it out to one of these events get there, these fun mini-meets are great! I highly recommend participating if you get the chance, they’re crazy fun and are good vaulting.

Moving on to the transitional period between the summer and winter seasons – some people call this period fall – I practiced when possible and made the best of the nice days when they came around. I couldn’t have done this without the help of the Springfield group, you guys are awesome! For all that don’t know, Patriot has recently opened up shop in Springfield Mass. There’s a good group of local coaches that run practices over there, and it’s a fantastic place to do some open pit jumping. It has a real grass-roots type feel, when they (hopefully) open up again in the spring its gonna be one of the places to be. Anyhoo, while at Springfield I was able to really hammer out a consistent run, which has done wonders for the rest of my jump. I was blowing through poles I used to struggle to get on, and my short vault really took off. I’m talking about getting my knees up to 13 from 3 steps (which for some reason I still struggled to clear from 7) and such. That’s HUGE for me. Ever since I’ve been working on translating those results back to longer runs and have seen some progress as of late.

If nothing else, the whole process of the fall season has taught me to really perfect one part of the vault before moving on to another. I feel as though that may be one of the key reasons why the summer ended so poorly. Even though I was practicing much more frequently in the summer, I got way over-ambitious and tried to fix 10 things at once. I really overdid it and lost all of my consistency because there was no part of my jump that I could rely on to be the same each jump. I’d have a terrible jump, then a jump worth 14 feet, then a handful of run-throughs because it became impossible to determine what changes were good or bad. Luckily, all this changed during the last few weeks of outdoor practice, and put me into a pretty good place at the start of the indoor season.

Now I’ve only had one meet this season (Harvard Open), and I’m not really sure how I feel about it but I’m already thinking that I’m going to have a massive breakout season. The first meet was… weird? It all went pretty badly for me: I got there late, forgot a uniform, dropped about $70 between gas entry fee and parking and proceeded to NH.

Awesome.

Oddly enough though, (and for those of you who know me or who have been to a meet where I’ve done poorly you know this is pretty odd) I’m really not that broken up about it. I got there, without warming up immediately blew through a 5-step, then blew through a 7-step on my full pole. Since I was so late, that was it for warm-ups. Then came the 3 jumps. On the first  jump I knocked the bar on the way up. I moved my standards back, smooshed my full run pole, and blew through the second jump. I moved up to a new pole, had a great jump and!!! forgot to move my standards in =( I was well over (as I was in the second jump) but just didn’t get the depth and caught the bar on the way down. Despite this, I really feel ok with the way I jumped Saturday. My jump felt sooooo consistent and I didn’t need 100 jumps to get there like I usually do. Once I figure out which pole I’m using on my full run I should be all set to finally get a consistent season down! Hopefully that consistent season can be full of jumps higher than my PR, but we will see. That’s about all I have for now, so thanks for reading, stop in soon for more updates,

~ Arthur

So, I haven’t actually pole vaulted at a college meet, but apparently Ingrid has faith in my ability to achieve collegiate pole vaulter status because she invited me to write for this blog. Collegiate throwing, on the other hand, I can talk at great lengths about.

Despite the fact that I haven’t made my collegiate vaulting debut yet (I’m hoping it will happen my first meet back from winter break) I’ve gotten to do all the wonderful drills and training that go alongside pole vaulting. It’s probably best that I have lots of groundwork training because I have attempted to pole vault twice in my history at Allegheny College. The first time, freshman year, I pulled my quad and was told no more jumping. The second, on the first captain’s practice of the season, I rolled my ankle. Despite all these very obvious warnings against throwing myself into the sky with the assistance of a fiberglass pole, I keep persisting.

And persistence is rewarded. That is the first lesson I have learned this season. Well, second. The first was to know which first I step with first on my runway. Much easier to avoid rolling an ankle in the box when you actually do your runway correctly. Imagine that.

Anyway, persistence.  I’ve had a lot of practice with it this season and I think it’s going to be a continuing theme. Lucky me. I, for the first time since I think freshman year (of high school), was assigned the glorious task of bubkas. I was supposed to do 25 of them after throwing practice and that would be my vault workout for the day. Easy, right?

No.

First of all, I couldn’t even do a full bubka (I still can’t but it is my goal for the end of indoor season). That was extremely frustrating. I barely even got my swing past 90 degrees. Thankfully, I have a wonderful jumping coach who saw my pitiful attempts, shrugged, and said ‘that’s why we practice. Start doing them twice a week’.

And so I did. And now, I can (almost all the time) swing fully up so I’m upside down. I haven’t extended yet, but it’s probably best that way. We don’t have rings so I’m going it on the pull up station in the weight room and am 89% positive that I’ll hit the ceiling if I fully extend. A convenient excuse. Pole vaulters are full of them.

Side note: Do any of you that do bubkas have problems with your hands sweating? I am deathly afraid of slipping while I’m upside which of course only makes me nervous which makes my hands sweat which sucks me back into this lovely cycle. Moral of this story, don’t wait to do my vault workout until after my throwing workout.

But now I’m home for winter break and have the wonderful Douglas Lang to patiently coach me through all of my pole vaulting neuroses so that this year I can finally jump 10 feet. Coach Lang promised me in high school that I would clear it, throwing got in the way of vaulting, but I’m still going to hold him to his promise.

And apparently I’m supposed to talk about things not related to track. They exist?

Kidding. I guess, I should probably give an introduction, which would have made sense to do at the beginning. And editing this would be very easy and I could put this at the beginning but I’m lazy. Thank you college. First thing I learned. Never do more work than you have to.

Also kidding. Professors love to see extra effort. In the you’ve prepared for the class discussion so you have something meaning to contribute way and not in the I’ve written an extra 4 pages for my essay. Not that I’ve done the latter, but I do a lot of paper writing and professors are very specific on their page limit.

Still haven’t introduced myself. In case you can’t tell, I get distracted easily. But I’m Kristin Collins, I attended Westborough High School and now I go to Allegheny College in Meadville, PA. It’s a cute little liberal arts school where I got to play volleyball and now participate in track. I’m a junior this year, terrifying because now I have to start thinking about this thing called real life. And by that I mean, I’m going to grad school so I can put it off for a little bit longer.

In case you couldn’t tell by this increasingly long-winded post (it will end soon, I promise) I’m a Creative Writing Major, History Minor. Which means a lot of reading and a lot of writing but I love it and am going to continue pursuing writing both in Grad School and Post-Grad.

And I feel like that’s good for a first post. I’m sure none of you want to hear about the finals I took or the papers I wrote on Victorian lit or the Jesuits or whatever that other paper I wrote was about (I swear I put in more effort than it sounds like here).

So i was so excited for my meet yesterday. So excited and nervous that I couldn’t sleep the night before. I get to the meet, find out men are going first, and this just makes me more nervous. Finally, it was time to start warming up. I did my warm-up and felt fine. Nothing was sore or tight. So then I started warming up on the runway. Having done a couple 3 and 5 step approaches, I was coming down on a 5 step approach and on my last step…POP. My hamstring. Oh no! I had such high hopes for the meet. My goal was 10’6″, which would have been a personal record, a school record, and an ECAC qualifying jump. So here I am, once again healing from an injury, unable to vault for a few weeks, probably until I get back to school for intersession training on January 5th. But enough about the bad news. Lets talk about the GREAT AND EXCITING pole vault practices I’ve been having!!!

So vaulting happens on tuesday and thursday in Oakland, NJ with Branko and Apex. Tuesdays are my small days where I focus on all the little things, starting from a one step, sometimes even a zero step. I do a bunch of ones focusing on getting my left hand up. When I have done it right enough, i move to a two step, no swing. Then after a bunch of those, I do a bunch of 3 steps, no swing, then 3 steps, swinging to a sit, then full jumps from a 3 step. These are great! I hold at around 10’6″ to start with, and have been wrapping myself over a 10′ bungee. Then sometimes I do 5 steps on tuesdays.

Thursdays are the days that I go big! I start off on a 3 step, doing full jumps. Then after only a few, I take some 5 steps. Pretty much the first week I started having big thursdays, Branko had me start doing 7 steps. Last thursday, I went through sooo many poles. I started on a 12′ 130, then immediately went to a 12′ 140, then a 12′ 150. After that, I went to a 13′ 135 holding at 11’3″ or 11’6″. Then a 13′ 140, then finally I ended up on a 13′ 145. I really liked that pole! The highest I held was 11’9″, and I was still getting a lot of bend, and was getting over a 10′ bungee with the standards all the way back. Last thursday, Branko was talking about me even getting on a 13′ 160 at the meet. I’ve never really jumped on a 13′ pole ever so that thought was just crazy to me! Pole vault practices are the highlight of my week. I have been stressed out with the amount of work I have, especially in the last week. You know you go to Stevens when you do spend the bus rides to practice and meets doing hw and studying! Yesterday after pole vault had finished, a few of us sat at the pole vault pits trying to figure out circuits hw!

Even though I am injured and can’t vault, I am still going to go to pole vault practices this week and just hang out with the vaulters and Branko, and help out the other vaulters on my team. Have some time that i don’t have to spend thinking about h.w. or studying. My stress relief for the week!

So all that stands between me and winter break is a lab report due tomorrow, some mech solids hw., an essay, a circuits quiz, and 5 finals. I won’t be headed towards home till December 23rd. Seems so far yet so close at the same time!!

Hey everybody! Okay, so last time I wrote we had just started events practices. So I’ll give you a quick update on how practices have gone the past few weeks. Monday sprint practices at Reggie are really tough, but they’re definitely paying off. I’m getting much faster and my running form has improved a lot too. Hopefully this will get me on some bigger poles later on in the season! Tuesdays and Thursdays we vault. The first couple weeks we just did 3 steps and then slowly progressed up hand grips and back to 4 steps, then 5 steps, and eventually 6 steps. As I’m sure all of you know, the 3 step drills get boring; but trust me, they work! Wednesdays we do drills. Sometimes pole runs, or slide box drills, or running drills, or hurdle stuff, etc. And Fridays, we do a light sprint workout, usually going at about 60-70% speed. Except this Friday, since we had a meet Saturday we just did 10 minutes on a bike.

And now the meet. I was very happy with how things went. I ended up clearing 12′ for second place. A great start to the season, especially since 12′ was my best all year last year; clearing it in the first meet gives me a lot of hope for the rest of the season! I was a little nervous going in to the meet since my last vault practice on Thursday was definitely not my best. But I think that may have been partially getting used to my brand new spikes But I felt good and ready to go after warm ups. I came in at 10’6″ with my standards at 65. My first attempt I was inside. Second attempt I moved my step back and cleared it by a lot. For 11′ I moved the standards back to 80 and cleared first attempt, cleared 11’6 and 12′ on first attempts too! I got really lucky on my 12′ jump though, I was really surprised that the bar stayed up. But I think I probably could have cleared it cleanly on a 2nd or 3rd attempt because my attempts at 12’6″ were pretty close. Throughout the meet I had to keep moving my step back because my run was getting faster and more aggressive (I decided I liked the new spikes haha) Overall, I was very happy with the day and can’t wait for the rest of the season

It was also great to see so many patriots there! Hopefully I’ll get to see more of you over winter break at some indoor practices! It’s crazy to think that this semester is already almost over! Just 3 more days of classes, 1 quiz, 2 finals, and maybe an extra credit paper left! And then I’ll be home in 2 weeks! It was great to be home for Thanksgiving, and then I got to see my parents and little sister again at the meet, and then I’ll be home for two weeks very soon! We get three weeks off of classes but only two weeks off of practice. So I’ll be back in Boston a week before classes with nothing to do but practice…yay! Well I guess that’s about it! Hope to see you guys soon

I’m not sure which is more frightening the fact that tomorrow is my first college meet, or the fact is little over a week ill be done with my first semester of freshman year.

School has been good, challenging but fun at the same time.  And now that track has started time seems to fly by.

In the first two weeks of the season I’ve probably run more then the last 2 years in high school.  We’ve run everything from 20 meter hills to 800′s in the rain.  I guess my days of slacking off left when I got my high school diploma.   Sadly thought my days of shoulder problem are still around.  I was about to do the right thing and go to rehab (PT) but before I could go the pain in my shoulder come back.  So now I will be going to rehab 3 times a week until, well I graduate or stop pole vaulting which ever comes first.  Moral of the story, and I cant believe I’m going to say it but go to the trainers and get help before things get to bad.
With my first meet tomorrow, we can up with a game plan. I will only be jumping on small pole (11 110) so it doesn’t hurt my shoulder at all.  And sadly I’ll have to stop after 6 attempts.  I guess breaking the school record in the first meet might be a little harder then I was expecting, but being safe is well worth the sacrifice.