Transitions

After I warmed up at Belton on Saturday, I was pleased that I had cleared 12' 6" (3.81m) twice easily on my smallest pole but I was bothered by the tightness behind my left knee. I haven't had that this year. The problem with missing your training rotations is you go too long between one segment and too short before the next. Not that it really matters, UNLESS you have a meet. The short rest cycle fell on the meet day and I just didn't feel right. This will sound strange but after warm up I didn't even want to jump. I really felt that I would be at risk of SOME little ding and things had been going too well to knowingly put myself in that position. Even as the bar started getting up near my starting height I really just wasn't that interested in jumping. I have never felt that way before at a meet and I can only attribute it to the mental side telling me it wasn't worth the risk.

I share this because it's really ironic that I train my ass off to jump in big meets, and this is one of my favorites, yet I didn't even feel like jumping. That's not true really as I felt pretty good and was very excited until I started getting these warning signals from my body during warm up.

Here's the biggest reason I'm revamping everything and cranking up all of my running, lifting, bars, cardio, etc. - http://masterspv.blogspot.com/2010/12/goals-mixed-signals.html In this post I talked about a guy who was done for the year because he had already reached his physical and technical potential. Though I haven't reached my technical potential on the longer poles, I have been in a holding pattern on advancing my physical skills so that I would be fresh enough to use the new poles. Well now I can jump on them from 8 steps (44') I need to get my butt back to work and what better time than a four week period before Reno, followed by a five week period before indoor nationals? The goal is to jump high in June and July, NOT January or March so NOW is the time. Besides, it's too cold to jump so I might as well get in better shape.

So there is my frustration that hit me after Saturday. Sure I can jump 13' (3.97m) every day in practice and can probably jump 13' 6" (4.12m) but that's just not going to be good enough. To step up I will have to be a better athlete and challenge my bigger poles from closer runs and use that success to progress to longer runs and still bigger poles. That has always worked for me but I can't realistically do that until the weather gets better. That will happen about the time I finish this nine week blast of training. So that's the plan and I'm sticking with it. Thanks for being here!! Bubba