Bouncing Back

My meet in Paris was awful. And by awful I mean every word that the thesaurus could possibly come up with to describe terrible performances. And that’s really all there is to say about it. Usually I like the idea that I have my own little corner of the web to complete untold stories. People look up results all the time and they just see the numbers. But what if I was sick? What if I had an injury? What if the weather was so bad it made my toes numb? At least I give the circumstances that surround my performances and that way those who care to know can come by and get a behind the scenes glimpse at what really took place. But for Paris? I’ve got nothing.

Well…I take that back. It is true that some days you just won’t be on. I mean…it’s true for me at least, because I know some days no matter how mentally and physically prepared I am, I just can’t seem to put it all together. I expect those days to be part of my career, but at this stage I’m a developed enough athlete to have some say in how bad those bad days truly are. They should never be embarrassing. Paris was. I take full responsibility for that and I can’t sit here and give you any good reason for it. I just let my mind get the best of me. I got so worked up about not being in Paris and then I went out there and acted like I didn’t really belong there.

I needed to relax. I needed to just concentrate on jumping far in the sand one jump at a time. Instead, I was focusing on what everyone’s seasons bests were, how many people I would need to beat to make a worthwhile amount of money, and what other unidentifiable Russian had jumped over 7 meters last week. I know better. I’ve learned from those mistakes in the past but it seems I was due for a bit of a refresher course.

There was nothing I could do but lick my wounds and take my empty pockets to Morocco the next day. When you have one day in between competitions you definitely aren’t fixing anything physically. All I really wanted to do was have fun and be a competitor that was competing in the moment. I did that. My jumps were not spectacular—the runways and the bad winds took care of that part—but my competitive spirit was what it needed to be. I know that this is the attitude I need to stay with me through the month of August as I finish out my season.

And while I have you here as a captivating audience, I’d just like to mention that I actually did jump further in Morocco than the results that were posted. I saw the tape with my own eyes and was proud of myself for putting my best jump out there at the end of the competition even after I already knew I had won. But somehow things got recorded wrong and that mark never showed up. It makes no difference except that I was kind of proud of it and nobody was going to know. But then I thought…hey, I got my own corner of the web to tell that part of the story. ☺