Monday evening happened to be the first time I’ve laid eyes on my jump spikes since August 16th; the date of the qualifying round for the Men’s Triple Jump in Berlin. True story. I even joked with my training partners about how I had to clean out some remnants of “Berlin sand” before I put the spikes back on. Moving past that though, this week unofficially marks a new phase for my training group since lifting has changed a bit and more importantly, because we’ve started up with some light technique work! Until now, all of my jumping and bounding has been with some sort of resistance: either a weight vest or with 18 inch boxes. Things with the boxes have been going well and I’ve started with them as far apart as last year, which is encouraging but Monday’s jump workout was essentially a test of where I am; at least it was in my own mind.

After a pretty good warmup and lots of jumping drills to make sure the legs were ready to bounce, including long jumps off of my left leg which felt awkward because I’m a right legged long jumper, we were ready to rock. The workout was pretty simple, and light as I mentioned, beginning with short approach triple jumps from 6 strides, then a few from 8, and a couple from 10. I’ll admit, my first jump from 6 strides was far from spectacular, in fact, I don’t even think I completed the attempt. Not the best way to “start” the season but that one attempt definitely didn’t define the training session. I was trying too hard and had to slow things down and calm down a bit so that I could get the most out of the workout; eventually I feel I was able to do that.

The goal was really just to ease back into things and work on rhythm. Once we got back to 8 strides I figured that if I just focused on maintaining a solid rhythm through all three phases of each jump, the strength that I’ve been working on up to this point would carry me out past 50 feet (15.24m) without much effort. As I’m sure you can guess, that’s where the phrase “Easy 50″ came from. Nevermind the fact that just hitting 50 feet was the goal for about half of my collegiate career, reminding myself that I am now just looking for easy 50s helps me slow down, relax and focus on jumping efficiently and with proper technique rather than worrying about jumping “far.” I consider Monday’s workout to be a success simply because I can’t recall jumping 50+ feet from 8 or even 10 steps, let alone in November or with such ease. It was perhaps even more of a success because I now have in mind some things that I’ll have to perfect before I can take on the rest of the world in March and beyond. Things like keeping my posture throughout the jump, my timing, my speed and being careful not to land prematurely. The first few factors will come with time, reps and as our training is geared to work on those specific things but I still like knowing what’s holding me back. All the better to correct the shortcomings.

Happy Thanksgiving y’all!