It's been a while since I last posted but believe me it's not for lack of material more for lack of time. I've been working hard and smart everyday. 121 days until the games kickoff and 128 days until the qualifying round for the women's triple jump so I've been getting the most out everyday. Over the past month I've had a couple a breakthroughs that I know will pay big dividends in my performance. Coach has allowed me to take a couple of short approach jumps in competition to see where my execution was. 10 step approach 40 feet was OK but not where coach wants me to be, so we've been really working the speed portion of our training to leverage all the strength I've been building in the weight room to carry more speed down the runway and ultimately more speed through each phase. To solidify my sprint training coach made me walk a day in the the shoes of sprinters without the luxury of training like one.
Imagine my surprise when Wednesday rolls around a few weeks back and coach tells me that I'll be running the 100m and 200m at a local meet on Saturday. My first instinct was to say call coach crazy but knowing him I didn't want to complain and make him consider making me run the 400meters. So I just smiled and said "OK Coach but the last time I was in blocks was 2005 for a hurdle race", he said he wasn't really concerned with my blocks but if I wanted we can work on blocks tomorrow(Thursday). Once I got home to look at the schedule for the meet I got my second surprise the two events were less then 1hour apart. At the time I thought that was close but I figured that should be plenty of time to recover. Saturday rolls around and after a decent 100meter my legs turn to lead quads are all sorts of tight and I walk over to coach and tell him that felt really long he laughs at me and tells me wait till the 200. Sometimes I really thing enjoys seeing me in pain, but I know it's my mind playing tricks on me, I must be imaging the smirk on his face when we do tough workouts that has me huddled over gasping for air, coach is much too nice to enjoy it, right? Anyway I run a decent 200 and although it wasn't as painful as I imagined I didn't dare utter that to coach. When we finish our cool down coach tells us next week we get back to jumping our break is over. All I kept thinking was I hope we don't have another break again because I prefer jumping. only coach thinks like that I'm glad we are now in our triple jump specific phase of our program.
The biggest breakthrough so far has been the emergence of my 2nd phase. For the longest part it's been one of the weaker aspects of my jumping. But the visualization coupled with my increased strength and power finally clicked and I can now say I have a solid 2nd phase to build upon. I'm really excited to see where it takes me in the next month as I really kick off the season. My approach still needs work while I adjust to carrying more speed but I know that is only a matter of time for muscle memory to kick in and I'm comfortable with this new approach.
A lot of good things happening so although I've been missing in action here I've been making plenty of progress on my journey to London.
