Vaulting in the Big Leagues

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

Hey there vaulters, runners and miscellaneous blog-readers,

for those of you who don’t know me, my name’s Arthur Tyler and I’m another “college” vaulter and runner that has been recruited to contribute to PPV’s bloggy thing. Notice I say “college” because my situation might be a little bit different than what you’re used to reading about. While I am in college and I am a pole vaulter, those things at this time are seperate and unrelated. This is due to a rather unfortunate missuse of a title nine clause, but its really not my place to poison your mind with such nonsense so lets move on the the more pleasant topic of pole vault.

One of the cooler things about being an unattached vaulter (beyond being able to jump around with the awesome people at patriot) is that I get to set up my practice and meet schedules however i want. Let me tell you, doing whatever you want is pretty awesome. There was a point during this winter season – and i use the term season lightly – where i just kept a pole in my dorm room and showed up to random open meets around new england whenever it was convenient. Plus practices would often consist of me kind of warming up and then just grabbing big poles and trying to jump on them, turns out there are a lot of poles I can’t jump on. Sounds pretty cool you say? Indeed it was, i was the pole vault equivilent of Tom Cruise’s maverick, living by my own rules. However for now those crazy days are behind me and I’ve settled into a more docile and regular practice and meet schedule that most of you vaulters can relate to.

Now the reason for this schedule change, or rather schedule formation is that unlike most high school and college jumpers my main season is the summer. During the summer I can practice more regularly and there are a lot more open meets for me to enter. So unlike the other bloggers who are pretty much in their off season, I’m just winding into shape right now. My first big meet of the season is coming up on this sauturday. For those of you who don’t know, the meet I am talking about is the Bay State Games. Competition for the men’s open division is looking pretty steep right now, so my best bet at getting one of the coveted Bay State jackets may be in the 400h instead of the vault. Crazy world right? But I am looking to hit a new PR and a 14 or 14.6 jump would probably fair pretty well. Who knows what’s gonna happen? I do, I’m gonna jump 14.6 and get really excited and yell a lot. Maybe.

Regardless, I’ll keep all of you vault/blog junkies up to date with my jumping carreer throughout the summer. Look for a new post a day or two after the Games. Thanks for reading,

~ Arthur