live + learn

It seems that just when I start feeling older (wiser?), it seems I am always quickly shown that I still have a lot to learn.
Although there were some good things to take away, Multistars turned into an ugly meet for me thanks to ridiculously poor jumps. Maybe it was jetlag and lack of sleep - Jake and I were both wide awake staring at the walls at about 3:45 the morning before the meet, maybe it was just one of those meets, but it's interesting how things turned out. It was actually the jumps I was most eageer to get to coming into this meet. I finally felt like I was grasping the long jump, my high jump has been getting more consitantly decent, and my vault had been going really well. My sprints were untested, my throws felt ok but still also felt untested, and I was actually really nervous to see what my 1500m fitness was like.
Although not amazing, all of my runs were real solid, my shot was good, my disc ok, my jav a work in progress, but I have no explaination for those jumps. It was real interesting dealing with the time change (6 hours ahead from the east coast) and travel (one 7 hours flight, one 5 hour layover, another 1.5 hour flight, one 2 hour car ride), but I actually felt pretty decent during my pre-meet shake outs on thursday and friday.
Thanks however to both Jake (Arnold), his brother Tom, and our new friend Joel Tull (decathlon massage master) I did learn a ton about competing internationally as well as had a great time. I'm still in Italy on my hotel's slow internet service thus I will save pictures and video for later, but I return tomorrow so I'll get some of the good stuff up asap. Heck, even Jake scored 7500 points here last year before coming back this year to score near 8000 for the win. Much like the contrast between my two times at the NCAA championships I guess I just need to chalk this first one up to experience, learn from it, and move on.

I did make a trip all the way up to Austria today which was pretty cool. I know some of you guys love the adventures of traveling with vault poles, so you'll like this one. Jake is competing in the Gotzis decathlon in 3 weeks and is going to stay in europe to train in Austria in the meantime. His ride up (the parents of an austrian decathlete) there kind of fell through so he was a bit stranded. He definitley couldn't bring poles on a train and we learned that despite advice from someone else, we couldn't rent a car one-way in between countries. We banded together and I volunteered to go up with them on the drive and bring the car back. Thus after a ton of running around (both literally and figuratively) we got a rental car delivered to our hotel (it's not easy finding decent sized rental cars in Europe), packed it full of 4 dudes (Jake, Tom, Joel, and I), Jake, Tom, and Joel's luggage, squeezed in Joel's massage table, strapped poles on the top and headed for the border. We got plenty of strange looks and even got pulled over by some non-english speaking cops just before the border (they don't like large objects roped to the roof of cars), but we eventually found our way to the town of Leinz where Jake is staying with a coach friend. After some Brats (which are amazing), I turned the car around and retraced the 4 hour journey back to Desenzano and got here relatively well considering I had very little idea what any of the road signs were telling me.
Now, in a couple of hours I get to see just how bad the Milano airport is going to freak out when I show up with pole on my shoulder expecting to get them on the plane...

wish me luck!

-matt