Now that I’m no longer in school and since I won’t be knee deep in bar exam preparations for about another month, I have more free time than I’ve had at any other point in my life. It’s true though, that training takes up a bit more time now than it did in previous years since I can afford to pay more attention to detail and other “little things;” so no more skipping out on ab sessions or sets of hurdle walkovers. Still, with the hours that I don’t spend at the track I’ve got a few activities that tend to help me pass the time on a daily basis so I figured I’d share some of them with y’all.

I can’t speak for other full-time track athletes but when I’m not at the track, getting treatment or sleeping (or hanging out with Ayanna of course) I’m either: reading, playing video games, watching one of many TV series, keeping up with new music, or working on a couple “legacy projects” (other than triple jumping) that I’ve got up my sleeve. Just like this is the most free time I’ve ever had, this is also the first time since my early high school days that I’ve been able to do some leisure reading and it’s been amazing. I’ve found that with putting some thought into the titles that I spend time reading allows me to learn just as much as I did when I was in school (ok, probably more); and it’s actually stuff that I think is more easily and immediately applicable. We’ve all asked “when the heck am I going to use this nonsense?!” when sitting through one lecture or another.

I tend to get through about 3 (sometimes 4 depending on the length and genre) books in a week and here’s what I’ve gotten through most recently. I’ve got a long list of books to read but let me know if you have any recommendations or if you’ve got any thoughts on the books I’ve already read.

• Now Reading: Made to Stick/Chip Heath & Dan Heath
• The 4-Hour Workweek/Tim Ferriss
• The 48 Laws of Power/Robert Greene
• The Art of War/Sun Tzu
• ReWork/Jason Fried & David Heinemeier
• Crush It!/Gary Vaynerchuk
• The Winner’s Brain/Jeff Brown
• Making Ideas Happen/Scott Belsky
• The Magic of Thinking Big/David Schwartz
• The Art of Non-Conformity/Chris Guillebeau
• The Girl Who Played With Fire/Steig Larsson
• Tribes/Seth Godin
• Purple Cow/Seth Godin

On the track this week, I may be doing some jump testing, similar to what I did last year around this time so I’ll report back on that as soon as I get a chance. Also, just for fun I jumped in with the George Mason team last week as they did some performance testing so I’ll share those results as well; even though I didn’t do all of the tests that the kids did.