Viktor Saneyev competed for the former Soviet Union in the triple jump from the 1960s all the way into the 1980s. He won 3 straight Olympic titles and grabbed a silver in his 4th Olympic Games in Moscow (1980). Along the way he was of course a several time European champion and also managed to set the world record a few times as well. Much of what my training partners and I do in training is somehow patterned after the methods of Eastern European jumpers of the past, like Saneyev; minus the probable chemical enhancements of course! As it turns out, Saneyev did some of the same jump testing exercises that my coach has us do a couple times a year and my coach is actually privy to some of his results.

Given my own results from last spring and this past fall (November ’09 results), I already had a distance that I wanted to hit on each test in mind. All in all, Wednesday ended up being a pretty good day in the office and I set personal bests in 3 out of 4 tests, with a couple of them being pretty significant. All of my previous personal bests were set last year around this time. With that said, I wasn’t able to reach the benchmark that I had set for myself: 75 feet. On a couple of attempts I should have been out over 76 feet but collapsed on a hop or wasn’t patient enough in the jump phase. Throughout the workout though, not only did I learn how to jump 75 feet the next time around, but I also learned that on the 4 hop test in particular, my coach had only seen two other people approach or surpass the 75 foot barrier (of course he could have been saying that just to help my confidence – mission accomplished): Viktor Saneyev and himself. I’ve gotten to see videos of Saneyev jump but haven’t had the pleasure of seeing my coach, Emmanuel “Skeeter” Jackson do his thing. From all of the stories I’ve heard from others though; I always imagine how much of a beast he was.

In any case, like my coach said, any of Saneyev’s achievements is something worth aspiring to. So I plan on first checking the 75 foot jump test mark off of my list (on all 4 tests)…perhaps I’ll just skip 75′ and go straight to 76′ though. I definitely feel like it’s possible. For now, here’s where I at the moment:

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April ’10 Jump Test Results