Time for some vaulting!
I love Stevens! I don’t know another way to say it. It is a small campus, with only about 2000 people, and there are still so many people I haven’t met yet. I met a lot of amazing people really fast too. There are the first people I met, when we went camping back at the end of august. We nicknamed our group the polliwogs. And there are the people I met in the first couple days at orientation. Then, there is the track team!
I love our track team. It is a very small team, but it is nice because we are all going to get to know each other really well, and we will be a close team. Sprinters and jumpers practiced together for the first few weeks, and this is what a typical practice looked like: 4 girls, 20 guys. We have a saying, “Stevens…where 1:4 isn’t just a statistic, it’s a way of life. The amount of guys is kind of overwhelming. They are everywhere, but it is still fun.
The Stevens Ducks are a division 3 school, and I was able get onto the track team with no problem. And, I will definitely hold the record here! For some reason there is a pole vault record for one season and not the other, but it is only 5’2”. Not really sure how that happened….so my goal is to double that record in my first meet! My first meet is Dec. 6th, a relay meet, at Yale I think. Apparently I am going to be in a relay by myself.
Well, anyways, practices have been a lot easier than I thought. I was expecting to go to college track practices and be so overwhelmed, but the opposite is true. At the beginning of the season my weeks would consist of speed work and lifting on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and tempo on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Tempo turned into pool workouts because of the weather. Our speed work was mostly repetitive 60s, and last week we did three 120s all out, with 10 minute breaks in between each one. One thing that is different from high school is that our speed work is all out and in spikes, with lots of rest, sometimes what feels like too much rest.
Now my weeks are going to be a bit different because I vault on Tuesday and Thursday nights at the New York Armory, which is a really nice place to vault! Wednesdays and Fridays are going to turn into tempo days, and Saturdays and Mondays will probably be speed work. We have to share the runway with whomever shows up to the armory and wants to jump, so on Tuesday there were about 30 people on the runway and by the time we warmed up we only had 45 minutes to vault. I got some one-handers, and three step jumps in and it just felt good to be in the air again. Our coach is supposedly really good too. He got a guy last year at Stevens from 13’ to 15’9” in one year. I have vault practice again tonight, but our coach, Matt, is not going to be there.
Only about 3 weeks of classes left until finals! I can’t believe I’m almost done with my first semester! It went by soo fast! I miss Patriot PV though and wish I was around to practice.
