Less is more

Its always an interesting experience explaining to someone that I am a decathlete. From my experience when asked what I do, the responses fall into one of 3 catagories:

1. Someone who actually knows the the decathlon is usually responds complementary or with a story. For instance, my downastairs neighbor the other day asured me of some knowlwdge of the event with, "wow, you've got to be really well-rounded." Ok, he's got at least a pretty good idea of the event and didn't have to ask any further questions (see below).
The "storytellers" will show you their understanding with a tale of their days high junping or running the mile in high school - often beginning with something along the lines of "I used to run track."

2. For flow of this blog I'm going to skip ahead to the other end, those with no idea what a decathlon is. Usually far from athletically inclined, I think these are the people that do whatch the Olympics here or there every four years but probably have very little understanding of track and field. Although at times frustrating, these encounters can be entertaining.
I think it's the "athlon" part of the name people do recognize which brings association with the olympics, but its about there the recognition ends and you get questions like "wow, how much do you swim?," or my personal favorite, "so that's like with the horseriding and shooting, right?" Such encounters provided for a funny story, yes, but this makes me sad more than anything. No offense to you modern pentathletes out there, but if there's a significant population in the United States that knows more about the modern pentathlon than something you devoted your young life to, well, I'm not evengoing to finish that thought. Good work on that Olympic coverage NBC. Single tear.
3. In the middle is the group that has some recognition of the event but not a great understanding. They can make the track & field association and, if they're older (as apparently I am too), they may even recognize a Dan & Dave reference. These people usual go with "wow, so how much do you run." As recreation runners, fans, or retired gym class mile run heros this is a simple and fair enough question that shows some level of understanding. In reality, however, its actually the most difficult question to answer.
I know that to most, proficiency in running is demonstrated by ability to run a lot, ability to run FAR. Coming from a professional track athlete, a "professional runner," they'd love to be awed by my 200 mile weeks or my double days of intervals and mile repeats. I'm 210 pounds dude, I don't actually like to run. Yes it feels great to run fast and I do like the feeling I get when I am DONE with a workout, and yes, I do love what I do, but I don't consider myself a professional runner. I am a decathlete, running hurts. My long runs rarely top 20 minutes (my new personal long record as of this summer is a whopping 5 miles - but I did do it 2 days in a row) and the majority of my "running" throughout the year is based around training for the 400m - and therefore sucks. On top of which, I am not fast - relatively speaking. Thus, even when I am running in competition I'm not exactly having
the time of my life, its more like hanging on. I'll never forget one of the dutch coaches in Italy: he looks across the table to Jake Arnold and I at breakfast and says, "I thought Americans were supposed to be fast."

This is actually why I enjoy this part of the year so much. It's getting towards Championship season with USAs on June 24 and thus everything is geared towards topping it all off. The bulk of the work is done, now is a lot of fine tuning. Some of my college coach, Deanne Vochatzher's favorite sayings (second only to "KNEE!!" when we're hurdling) are "the hay is in the barn," or, "the money's in the bank.". Although there's still a little more work to be done, a lot of it now is polishing.
Case and point, if you really want to know just how much I run as a "professional runner?" On Sunday I ran for roughly 69.5 seconds. That's it. If you only took that long to brush your teeth your dentist would be pissed. Even worse, the whole workout took me about 40 minutes and I ran a grand total of 600m. How's that for tough? I'm on pace for about a 90 minute mile if I keep it up and dig down for a big kick finish.
The workout was actually 4 x 150m with 10min for recovery so they're all out. The security guy gaurding the tent on the infield for graduation definitely thinks I'm crazy (it doesn't help that it was raining), but that's the great part about this time of year. Every practice you're going for it. You're hitting new bests in the weight room (I'm just trying to keep up with Ben Affleck who can be spotted in our weight room), finding yourself in new places in the jumps, and reaching new territory in the throws. Even the sucky workouts (3 x 300) make you feel good. It's actually a hell of a lot of fun and pretty damn addicting.

On the other end this time of the year is a bit of a bummer because I don't get to hang out with my Jets. I've been traveling a ton both for Harvard and for my own competitions (I've spent the last few weekends in Italy, New Jersey, Greensboro, and now Dallas) and the Jets have taken their practices outdoors and off-site so it's been impossible for me to get to them. I'm gonna try to check in with em next week, but hopefully they understand. Don't get me started on the social life. If it wasn't such a mess I'm sure my roommate would be thinking about subletting my share of our apartment.

I am excited though. In about an hour ill be back in Dallas for what I hope to be a great summer of competitions. Ill try to keep you posted on how TGA goes this weekend and for those of you in CA, I'll be coming home for a little training camp before the US Champs in a couple weeks.

-matt

TGA

Im planning on putting some time into some posts soon (re: im traveling a lot so finally have some downtime in airports and on planes), but in case I slip I wanted to give you guys a quick update. I leave tomorrow for Dallas and the Texas Greatest Athlete multi.
The plan is to use this as a tune-up for the US Champs at the end of June, but as this is the first time in as long as I can remember that i'm going into a meet without a qualifying mark hanging over my head on top of the fact that I've PR'd at this meet a couple of times before - this might turn into a bit more than a simple "tune-up." We'll see. The plan is to compete in 8 or so of the events but really we're just looking to go into it loose and use it as an opportunity to take some chances and raise the bar.

I'm actually a little (well... A LOT) anxious as this is the first time I've had to ship my poles since having them destroyed coming home from this meet last year, so bypass any good luck wishes to me and send them to my poles!! Thanks to the incredibly gracious help from many of you i'm flying a tube full of beautiful new poles so it feels a little like parents must feel the first time they let their kids go to a sleepover...

Better

No matter what the outcome, its always amazing how different I feel after my first decathlon of the year. Yes there are multis indoors, but at 7 events even those meets seem like practice. The fall and winter, now even most of spring as my schedule shifts (and I get better), feel like endless training. Just when it starts getting a little tedious and I start to wonder a bit about what I'm doing it all for, I hit that first meet and it all becomes clear. You're body remembers, "oh yeah, this is what its all about." Yes there's definitely a recovery period in which you basically feel like trash for a couple days, but recently I've been noticing a huge jump in confidence and even sense of strength coming out of these opening competitions. Even outcomes under expectations, as this past meet, finally knowing what pieces are there and what others need more work gives a huge boost to my
training both physically and mentally.
I tested my legs out with what was suppposed to be some easy 200s last week but after the first I was able to put together one of my best workouts of the year. In Friday's long jump session I finished an hour of jumping with a jump 40cm (and 100pts) longer than anything I jumped in Italy - off an approach 4 strides shorter than my full approach! The day before I took some of the best feeling high jump training jumps I've had all year.
I still have a lot of work to do before USA's at the end of June, which is coming fast, but it feels good to know I'm still on track.

This actually leads me to a pretty good point. Obviously in Italy I did not handle all the travel well. Despite feeling fine on thursday and friday leading into saturday's competition, my jumps showed that I must have left my legs somewhere in the states. I think for one thing I need to manage my sleep around my flights better as well as do much more moving around in flight to prevent the blood pooling in my legs (I had legitimate "cankles" post-flight), but would anyone like to share any advice for handling extensive travel for competitions?

Thanks all for your support,
Matt

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

day one down, gots work to do.

Hey guys,

A quick post as I have to get to bed. Day one was a little rough. I actually "got to" compete in 6 events as the timing didnt had a malfunction in my heat of the 100 so we had to re-run it. It was actually a decent time, but when I got to the long jump my legs felt terrible. I don't know if it's some travel catching up to me, just one of those days, or the terrible time sleeping I had last night, but I had some real bad hydration problems early in the meet. I recovered well in the shot with the 4th best throw overall, but by the time I got to the high jump I felt like I had somehow gained 40 - 80 ilbs and had been skipping out on practicing the last couple of months. I struggled over a couple heights before an early exit, but again came back with a decent 400m for this early in the season.
Overall Im down a just under 200 points from PR paces so I've got some work to do tomorrow, but I'm anxious to see what I can put out there.

-matt

Ciao!

hey guys,

I made it safe and despite the travel, the legs actually feel pretty good. I think ive adapted pretty well to the time shift as well with a solid night sleep last night and not too much grogginess. We got in late weds night so just had time for a quick jog around town to shake the legs out and scope things out then get some dinner.

Yesterday we (Jake Arnold (the other american) and Susan the Canadian) made it over to the track to get some more quality work in before doing some site-seeing around the lake. Today was another shake out at the track for some pre-meet but it was a lot more crowded as the rest of the athletes started to show. Theres about 30 guys and as many girls from 29 different countries.

Ive got to make it quick because im at a cafe on the way back to the hotel, but im pyched for the start tomorrow at 10:15 our time (4:15am east coast time). We are gonna see if we can do some damage for the US. You can check meet results, pictures, startlists, and updates at multistars.org.

Ciao!

Matt

Multistars

Woo-hoo! This time tomorrow I will be over the Atlantic on my way to Desenzano, Italy for the Multistars decathlon. More to follow and I'm going to do my best to keep you guys updated on my trip and results from the meet, but until then, wish me luck!

The official meet website is Multistars.org so you can find info and hopefully results and pictures there as well.

I also have to really thank In the Arena for making this all happen - No way I would be able to put this trip together without their support.

Hopefully talk to you guys soon,
Ciao,
Matt