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5/12/2019

Sunday practice

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 A beautiful day for pole vaulting practice.
​The ol' legs felt a little bit dead today as I started warming up, but things turned out OK. I joined in with a small group of young high school kids who seemed mostly to be fairly new to vaulting -- lots of new faces -- and Jack had them doing some platform vaulting, which I had done a couple of times before, but not quite like this.
​He asked me if I wanted to try it, and I told him I'd watch a few of them go at it first.
It looked a little intimidating, as the first few youngsters lifted their pole, ran a few steps along an runway elevated to probably 5-feet  high, planted the pole down on the ground off the end, jumped, and took off into a soft, squishy pit below.
​I wasn't real keen on the idea of having a spectacular crash and burn doing something I wasn't used to doing, but decided what the heck. So I got in line, climbed up there, walked out to the edge of the runway, where Jack gave me a few tips on how to do complete the drill, then backed up, took a deep breath, and went for it.
Wham!
​I splashed down successfully onto the landing pads -- decent form, a successful jump, and uninjured.
Well, all right.
Let's go again.
​Everybody went through maybe a dozen rotations, then the kids moved on to some one-step drills over on the secondary pit, and I went over to the main runway and worked my way up to a five-left approach. Sometimes, I'm still pulling on the pole, instead of pushing, and that makes me "helicopter," or sort of turn sideways through the jump -- which is not good.
For the most part, though, I jumped pretty well. We rarely jump using crossbars at Jack's place, so I'm not exactly sure how high I'm actually jumping these days, but I'm fairly confident about going 8-6 at next month's Nationals.
​After I hit a nice jump on my biggest pole, straight to the back of the pit, hips fairly high, and no helicoptering, I decided to call it a day.
Adios, y'all ...
​

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    John Henry Clark is a personal trainer certified by the National Academy of Sports Medicine, with a specialty in Senior Fitness. Since October 2017, he has been training and competing in Masters track and field as a pole vaulter. Although he took up this demanding sport for the first time ever at age 60, in one of his first Masters competitions, Clark won a gold medal at the Oklahoma Senior Games, qualifying for the June 2019 National Senior Games in Albuquerque, N.M. His mission is to show others by his own example that "you're never too old, and it's never too late." Why not today?

    johnhenrytrainer@gmail.com

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