Vaulting in the Big Leagues

This semester is finally over!!!!!

After reading close to 3,000 pages in chapter books, writing close to 60 pages of essays, learning well over 300 note card, and begin stressed out of my mind, I’m beyond excited for this semester to be over.  Last year being a business major I had little work to do, but after switching over to being an early education major the work load has tripped in size.  At first I had no clue how to handle all the work which effect my jumping a lot.

The first meet of the season went no where near as well as I was hoping.  After dropping my bagel cream cheese side up  on my lap at breakfast, I knew it was not gong to be a good meet. I almost no height, had a mental break down and just wanted to go back to bed.  So going in to the second meet I was a little hesitant to jump.  I jumped better but was a little disapointed with only making 9’6, but I was happy I had a good day. After the work load finally settled down, my jumping became better.  I finally started to care a lot more and was ready to jump again. Finally with a great practiced under my belt I finally felt good about going on break.

I guess stress does really take a toll on your body if you know it or not.  Sometimes there nothing you can do but just move past it, and keep your head up.  The worst that will happen is have a bad day.

Now all I need to do it have a nice break and get ready to go RENO!!!!!!!

Happy Holidays!

Hi all,

Sorry for the hiatus from the blog. It was due to a big hiatus from the vault. At WPI we have a big project to do our junior year and I just happen to be completing mine off campus on Nantucket (living the life, I know.) I just finished my project this week, but have been stuck on this island the last two months with no track, no runway and more importantly, barely any streetlights for when it gets dark out. This made for some interesting workouts, especially with the gym on the island being $170 per month and me being too broke to pay for it.

Before the project when I was at school, there were also some complications involving my super time consuming prep class for this project and Kyle’s evening grad classes, so I only got over to patriot once during the fall

But here I am, ready to kick off break and my access to the gym tonight. It’s time to get back into weight lifting (ouch.) and get my butt into all around shape for january practices. Lots of core, yoga, sprints and pole drops for me this break.

I get one last vacation (read, cool stuff by day, NEED to work out *note to boyfriend who is taking me on this trip: NEED* by night) before the January season starts and then it’s back into a whirlwind of classes, practices and meets.

I’m not sure how ready I am to step foot back onto the runway. I have not attempted a jump since September and to be quite honest, I’m chalking my first meet up to getting the cobwebs out of my legs.

Anywho, I’ll let everyone know how the season goes, but as for right now, it’s time to get my butt out of bed, finish packing and get off this island and to the local Y!

Jacqui

I figured three posts in one day was a little excessive, and then I realized if I didn’t type this up I would forget what I was going to say (either I’m getting old or finals stress is already wrecking my brain). So I waited three days.

Had my last first indoor meet, and it went really well! PR’d in weight, almost hit the 45 foot mark I randomly chose as my goal, and I didn’t suck at shot put. Now I get to wait until January 21st for my next meet. And I probably won’t throw weight again until after break. And why did we have that meet again? I still haven’t quite figured out the point of the random meet before winter break. But I did well, and I had lots of fun, and I finally saw the Dark Knight. Movies for this trip were surprisingly good. Dark Knight, then the Breakfast Club on the way there.  On the way home Bridesmaids (which I puts my headphones in and ignored) and then How to Train Your Dragon. Last one was by far the best.

Oh right, I’m supposed to be talking about athletics. Well, to celebrate how awesome we were at our meet (every thrower pr’d in something) we got Monday off. And yesterday and today we’re redoing our maxes to see how much stronger we’ve gotten. Yesterday was  a super success. Increased my power clean by 52% (and we’ll just pretend we didn’t bench…). We all wore lifting belts and got to throw the bar down on the ground where it crashed and rattled and made a bunch of noise so pretty much we were super BA. Today we’re squatting and hang snatching. A little nervous about the snatching, but we’ll see how it goes. Oh, and we’re throwing weight after that. Which at first made no sense to me. Why throw 20 pounds around after doing three leg maxes. Turns out throwers are just as big of head cases as vaulters (go figure) and our coach is hoping that if we’re exhausted then we’ll focus on form instead of whining about distance.

I guess that leaves school. The good news: my finals are all due the 16th. The bad news: that’s nine days from now. I have a 15 page research paper on how the mind-body problem manifests itself in Jewish American Immigrant Fiction. Did that sound smart? I hope so. My plan is to sound like I know what I’m talking about and hope my professor doesn’t realize that I actually have no clue. I have two 6-25 page (a bit of a range there) short stories due which means I should probably start redrafting them..and some philosophy paper that hasn’t been assigned so I don’t know how long or what it’s on or anything. But it’s fine. Why would I want to know those things anyways. It’s not like finals count as a significant part of my grade or anything.

And the most important part of my college life: the fun part. 12 of our alumni from last year are coming up for the annual Christmas Party so this weekend is going to be wonderful! There are three that I really want to see that I haven’t seen since graduation so I’m super stoked. Until I remember finals and start panicking.

And now it’s nap time. Because my roommate for some reason was laughing until like 1am, and I had an 8am shift at work. Note to self: pick better hours next semester.

So I was thinking “Yeah I’m gonna be a good little collegiate athlete and write a blog post after the Smith meet this weekend. It’ll look even better since no one’s posted in a while.” Then I come on and Chriss JUST posted.

Anyways yesterday was my “first” collegiate meet. Granted it wasn’t an official meet for us so I wasn’t competing for UMass, so when all’s said and done, it wasn’t any difference between this and every other meet that I did indoor in high school. I guess one difference would be that instead of having Doug or Ingrid or someone to coach me, I just had to rely on my teammates (luckily we had quite the pole vault crew!). I decided that for fun, instead of competing just unattached I would give Patriot some representation out in western Mass since everyone else was in Boston. The meet itself went pretty well. I won it, but I only had two competitors (my teammate Alyssa and som girl from Smith). What was more exciting than winning was realizing that this was the first meet I had competed in completely uninjured in a long time. I only went 9’6, but considering I’d been hitting a solid 9′ for a while, it was good to get back over that mental block. One thing I definitely need to work on is having more patience, but the funniest moment was probably being told to be more patient up top and then proceeding to have my most rushed jump immediately afterwards…oops!

Enough about the Smith meet. You guys are probably wondering how this young padawan is doing in the big scary world of D1 collegiate track, eh? Well, sometimes I feel like my major is too sciency, and other times (especially the beginning of the semester) I feel like my life is devoted to track. All in all it’s going good so far. I mean there’s that little bit of fear that I won’t make roster since the roster hasnt been finalized yet. Preseason training went pretty well, of course I wished I had trained more over the summer to avoid some of the soreness that came with the first few weeks. One big thing that I was glad I had on my side though was the fact that I could actually do most of the drills right off the bat, never have I ever been so happy for the countless hours I spent at indoor Patriot practices. One interesting thing was that at the beginning of the season Coach Jackson told me that he was going to be telling me lots of things that would probably be different than what I was taught at Patriot, on the contrary though, everything that he has stressed to me this fall were mentioned to me within the past year while I was at a Patriot practice. Essentially, I have gotten to pick up where I left off. The worst part has been having to get used to Spirit poles since coming into UMass, the last time I had used one was relays junior year when I went up, stalled out, and crashed back down one the runway scraping up my side. Needless to say, that was a bit of a mental block.

Well, I ought to get back to homework since as Chrissy said finals are quickly approaching. I’m hoping that with this kind of start to the season I can maybe, just maybe PR for the first time since leagues sophomore year.

Oh! Doug, coach Bell from Pioneer Valley Pole Vault says hi.

Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah! Happy Kwanzaa! Happy winter solstice! Happy other winter holidays that I can’t remember since I don’t feel like running down to the lobby!

Bless me, PPVCers, for I have sinned.  It has been over a month and a half since my last post….I think.

Well, hello again!

I think it might be better to just separate this post out into categories: Athletics & Academics.

Athletics:  Training has taken an interesting turn this year.  I had been mostly injury-free (besides nasty shin splints) and training really hard.  I’ve done the most sprint-training since my freshman year back when I actually was a sprinter.  It felt really good for a while to be back on the track, but then it took a nasty turn.  I was pounding too hard on my legs.  I was absolutely useless on actual pole vaulting days.  I couldn’t get off the ground.  My runway was off.  Coach Jackson said I was running “gingerly” towards the box–which is not something I take lightly.  I’m proud of my powerful runway, because well…for a while that’s all I really had going for me in pole vaulting (probably still is!).  It looked like workouts were starting to do more harm than good.

So we both decided (okay, Coach decided) that I would pull back on the pounding and focus on keeping legs fresh.  My training is off the track, very little sprinting and more mechanics and technical stuff.  Pole vault practices are the pounding days and he wants me to treat them more like meets when it comes to my legs.  He wants to really see how I can get stuff moving and have quality practices because I’m already in good shape running-wise.  We’d taken the approach of less is more.  It’s always kind of hard to hear that–especially when you’ve been taught your whole life to train hard and push harder to work for what you want.  But you can’t just train hard, you have to train smart.

Then I got into a car accident.

I’ll bet you were starting to think there wasn’t going to be anything crazy in this post.

My mom and I got rear ended at a stop light coming from Red Apple Farm in Phillipston, MA.  A big pickup truck towing a trailer with 4-wheelers on it didn’t stop in time and crashed into us.  No one was seriously hurt, but we had a lot of weight slam into the back of our vehicle (my previous car, my 95 Jeep Grand Cherokee–which surprisingly took the hit like a CHAMP!).  It resulted in some serious soreness and whiplash for the both of us, which meant a week off for me and multiple trips to the chiropractor and athletic trainers.

As stressful as it was to manage the before-Thanksgiving-”get all your work in”, now adding scheduled appointments, and that I was in so much pain I couldn’t even carry a backpack around campus, I was grateful for the week off from track.  My legs recovered nicely and I came back feeling fresh and ready to jump.  I already see an improvement in practice and I’m taking better quality jumps.

We’re still continuing with the less is more routine, so it’ll be interesting to see what Winter training will have in store for me when we go up to 3 sessions a day and start competing.

Academics: This semester flew by!  This week is the last week of classes and finals start next week.  I’m ready for the break.  I believe I’m going through what they describe as “burnout”, at least that was a vocabulary word from one of my education classes for “teachers who have little to no motivation for their work and tend to take it out on their students.”  I hear ya, Teach.  Except I don’t take it out on my students, more like my roommates and family (when I see them). I wander the house grunting, “UGH!” and they hear obscenities coming from my bedroom while I click clack away at yet another paper.  (Thanks, guys! Love you!)

But ’tis the season to be jolly.  Christmas/Winter break is almost here!