My first trip to Jamaica was long overdue and probably a bit too short to actually enjoy it like you’re supposed to. This was a business trip though.

After some uncertainty about whether or not I would be competing at the meet at all, I received my flight itinerary a little over two hours from the “wheels up” time so I was in hustle mode from the get-go. With my flight leaving from Baltimore as opposed to Washington National airport for some reason, I had a 45 mile drive in some thick Friday afternoon traffic before making it onto the plane.  Thanks to my tight schedule I found myself running from security to my gate (of course I first cut the security line to save some time) which is something I laugh at when I see other people doing. Guess I won’t be laughing anymore.

The flight to Kingston itself isn’t a long one really, but with the layover in Miami and then passport control in JA, I was exhausted by the time I got to eat dinner at almost midnight. Even so, I felt mostly rested on the day of the competition but the fact that we competed after 8PM didn’t help my cause. The meet itself was amazing though. It’s no mystery that track and field might as well be the national sport in JA and the crowd definitely reflected that fact. With probably no more than 25,000 people in the stands, it sounded as if there were 60,000 and the athletes definitely responded. For a meet in the first weekend of May there were some amazing performances across the board so as a fan of the sport, I had a great time! Ayanna being at the meet to compete in both the triple jump and long jump definitely helped my overall experience too though.

As far as the triple jump competition is concerned, like I hinted at above, we started a good bit behind schedule (about 40 minutes to be exact). On top of that, with all of the winds being headwinds, I’m not sure why we didn’t jump in the opposite direction. In any case, while I wish I had some video to share, I’ll just say that I ran through the board for the second time this season and jumped 16.80m into a 1.2m/s headwind on my first jump. The other jumps ended up being all over the place (all of them fouls either because I was over the board or ran out of the hop because things didn’t feel right) but the 16.80m felt easy and that’s a great thing. Getting the W is a good thing too and that jump was enough to do that. The distance could have/should have been a bit farther but my jump phase wasn’t as long and patient as it usually is but that’s an easy enough fix and a fix I’ll make at my next meet in Brazil.

This is a good starting point as the meets get more and more serious and competitive from here on out.