Vaulting in the Big Leagues

Ok, so it’s officially my first week back at WPI – I got here on Monday – and we started practicing right away. After unpacking I had a 5 o’clock practice which was pretty intense on the warm up, drills, and hurdle mobility stuff. We did a few shorter sprints around our fabulous, ancient 80 meter indoor track but overall it was a good practice… until our coach told us that the rest of the week would be double practices so she would see us bright eyed and bushy tailed at 6AM! The idea of practicing so early was that morning and evening practices would be almost 12 hours apart, but still, 6AM? That’s brutal. However, everyone showed up – although admittedly just about everyone was still 60% asleep – and we had another practice of really focusing on drills and such. We then did a nice little hill workout in the balmy 9-degree weather. That evening we focused on our primary events, so for me vaulting J we did lots of drills and handstands, but overall the practice was successful and a whole lot easier than the morning’s practice.

At any rate, classes start today – yes, we still had practice this morning and we’ll have it again tomorrow (Friday) – and I’m really looking forward to C-term, aka 3^rd quarter. I’m going to miss winter vacation, but it’s great being back at WPI

Hey everybody I am officially on break (well, really I’ve been on break since December 18th) and it is fabulous! No classes or stressing over finals: it’s practically perfect!

We had our first meet on December 5th, and I thought it was pretty similar to leagues or districts in high school. There were about five colleges at the meet and scoring was for the top six places in each event. Most events had qualifiers and then finals, but pole vault didn’t or we would have been there all day Ha-ha. As it was women’s pole vault started at 11 and went for a while since there were 14 girls, 7 of whom were from WPI Coach Iggy came to Springfield to help us which was much appreciated especially when the officials kicked out everyone other than the competing athletes and coaches. Vaulting went on for a while but ended at 10 feet. Then the guys vaulting started and went on to about 4. Since we weren’t allowed to eat in the track area I made the mistake of not leaving to get lunch before 4 (trust me, this was a bad idea. I’m surprise my stomach didn’t implode from hunger, ha-ha). After vaulting ended everything seemed to happen super quickly and before I knew it our first meet was over.

Overall I had a good time and while I didn’t do as well as I had hoped – I vaulted 8’6″ that day but had wanted to get 9′ – but as Iggy pointed out, this was a good starting point. There was plenty of room for improvement (oh yes, lots and LOTS of room for improvement), but  I hadn’t completely tanked.

The week after our meet but prior to finals we did a lot of hill workouts since the track was covered in snow and ice but the hilly streets of Worcester were pretty well plowed. That was super fun, but everybody made it through those days in one piece and not too badly hurting, so overall it was declared a success The next week (finals week ) our coach didn’t hold official practice, telling us to take as much time as we needed to study while doing the workouts on our own. It was pretty much the same stuff as we had been doing the week before but thankfully the track had melted enough that we could use it. Well that seems to sum up track before break. The only other thing worth mentioning is the Dartmouth invitational on January 10th which I’m thinking of going to. Jacqui asked me about it and we both thought it would be a good idea to go to, so hopefully that will end up happening.

That’s it for now. Hope everyone had a happy holiday and is looking forward to the New Year

Hey everyone! So as some of you probably already know, I’m now a freshman at WPI! Yay This post might end up being pretty long with the first paragraph about starting college. If you’re not really interested in that or anything feel free to skip to the second paragraph where I’ll talk about my track experience so far. Enjoy!

Okay, so being a freshman is super exciting and so much different from high school. Right now I’m a biology/biotechnology major, but I’m thinking of switching because I didn’t really like my biotechnology class. However, I’m taking a couple more bio classes this year before I commit to changing my major to aerospace engineering. Big jump, huh? Starting college was a really unique experience and so many unexpected things happened that I don’t even know where to begin. Both of my roommates are fabulous and I’ve made a ton of friends, mostly the kids living on my floor, but also with a lot of track kids and girls in my sorority. Yep, that’s right, I just recently joined Alpha Xi Delta and I absolutely love it! Classes are pretty good so far; there’s a lot of homework and they’re so much faster paced than in high school but so far I’m managing everything fairly well. I’m also a member of the green team which is basically a club focused on raising awareness about sustainability on campus, and I’m most likely going to join Habitat for Humanity this year. So overall I’m taking class, doing track, a member of Alpha Xi, on green team, a part of habitat for humanity, and doing a little bit for colleges against cancer. Sound like a lot? To me it does, and it’s definitely more than I ever did in high school, but I’m learning a lot from doing so many things and I absolutely love it. After all, getting involved on campus is one of the best ways to meet people and have a great time. I think that’s enough of my freshman-ness for now, so on to the good stuff… track

For me track started with captains’ practices in September (I think). Basically three captains (the “sprinting” captains for the guys and the girls and the guys’ “multi-event” captain) met Monday through Friday on the track and held a small, semi laid-back practice where we focused on getting in shape for the season. These captains’ practices were great for me since I was pretty out of shape from the summer and it also allowed me to meet a lot of my future teammates. Not going to lie, the first few practices were kind of hard for me and made me question my abilities as an athlete: if I was having this much trouble pre-season, would I a good member for the team or would I just end up being the worst athlete? At any rate, a bunch of the WPI vaulters started going to Patriot practices twice a week after classes. I really enjoyed this because not only did I get to improve my vaulting (trust me, after plateauing at 9′ my senior year, I needed an intervention) but I also got to meet the other vaulters and get to know them better.

Our indoor season finally started in early November. The first practice wasn’t too hard, and that helped to boost my confidence about my abilities as an athlete as well as convinced me that I could be on this team. Unfortunately, the workout was a lot (and I mean, a LOT) harder then next day when we had an actual workout, but after a couple weeks of conditioning coupled with our biweekly vault practices I could tell that I was getting better. The workouts weren’t as hard as the first week and my vaulting technique was slowly but surely getting better (or at least I like to think so). Granted, we’ve only been officially practicing for four weeks, but our first meet is this coming Saturday at Springfield College and I am absolutely PUMPED! Honestly, the WPI vault crew this year is looking fabulous and we are gonna be pretty awesome on Saturday!!!

Sorry for the super long post, but I couldn’t help trying to say everything that’s been going on in the past three-ish months. Hopefully my next post will be a (short!) synopsis of our meet and the week of practices leading up to it. Hope you enjoyed reading this!!

Oh, and just for anyone who’s interested, here’s a quick overview of our workouts for the past couple of weeks:

Monday – Warm-up = 800m, 6 x 100m strides; Sprint Drills = A skip, B skip, high knees, butt kicks, lunges, etc.; Workout = 10 x 120m sprints; Cool-down = 400m

Tuesday – VAULTING! <3

Wednesday – Warm-up = 400m, 6 x 100m strides; Sprint Drills; Workout = 4 x 60m, 4 x 80m, 4 x 90m (2 sets of all 3); Cool-down = 400m

Thursday – VAULTING!

Friday – Recovery Day: Warm-up = 800m, 10 x 100m strides

Saturday – Warm-up = 10 x 100m @ 50%; Sprint Drills; Workout = 5 x 30m, 5 x 60m (2 sets of both), 1 x 400m stride; VAULTING (optional, later in the afternoon)