Sooooo it has been quite a while since my last blog update. My apologies. Much has happened.

The official season opened up with some disappointing performances; which, based on the amount of training I had under my belt this year, was to be expected. My first meet of the year was the Kansas Relays, held in Lawrence. Where I hurdled and long jumped. Other than that, I had only one other open meet, held here in Manhattan. I had a significant personal record in the shot put, a throw of 14.01meters (46ft), up from my former pr of 13.17m(43ft) from junior year of college. While I wasn't satisfied with my other performances at either of these meets, it was nice to finally get back on the track and compete rather than watching from the side-lines or worse, running repeat 600s.

My first heptathlon of the year was The Drake Relays, in Des Moines Iowa. I can't explain how nice it was to get out of Manhattan for a week, even if only to go to Iowa. It was my first time competing at the Drake Relays, and also, i believe, the first time it didn't rain for the meet. While none of my marks were particularly noteworthy, once again, it was fantastic just to be able to go out and compete after months of injury, recovery, and conditioning. While I wasn't expecting anything phenomenal, my final score was 5,505. Lower than I would have liked, but isn't it always?

In May I was blessed with an opportunity to compete in New York at the Adidas Grand Prix. It is a great meet, part of the Diamond League, and just one stop on the Visa Championship Series. Being a smaller competition, a full hepthahlon was not run; instead, for the multi-eventers, just three events were contested: the shot put, long jump, and 100m hurdles, in that order (don't ask me why). Overall, the meet went well. The field was very small. Hyleas Fountain - 2008 Olympic silver medalist, Jessica Ennis -2009 World Champion, Bettie Wade - my fantastic roommate (she has other notable accomplishments, but being my roommate far outweighs them, haha!), and myself. The shot put didn't go very well, after two fouls, I managed to put one out there at 12.85m and still came very close to fouling it as well. However, I got a personal best in the long jump of 5.94 (up from 5.89 from senior year of college), and ran 13.87 in the hurdles, a season best at the time. Overall a solid performance, especially considering my poorer performances earlier in the year.

I will compete in two more meets this year: USA Nationals, and The Thorpe Cup Team USA v. Team Germany. More to come soon... i promise.

Push Up City

No, really. I've done more push ups in the past three weeks than probably the entirety of my life leading up to now. On the down side, I haven 't been able to lift my arms high enough to comb my hair lately . On the up side, I'm pretty sure I'm going to be able to physically relocate peoples' houses in a few months. Let me give you a week in the life:

Monday: 2x20
Tuesday: 4x20 and 2x15
Wednesday: Rest
Thursday: 30x regular push ups + 30x double push ups (so really 60) + 30x staggered hands push ups + 30x rotational push ups = 120 (or 150 technically)
Friday: 2x20
Saturday: 4x30
Sunday: 9x10
GRAND TOTAL: 520!



In general, training has been going great so far. My legs still feel a bit weak and out of shape compared to how they typically feel during pre-season, which is to be expected after taking nearly 6 months off of training. My upper body feels great, and my posture has improved dramatically.

I lift in the mornings on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, then have afternoon practices on those days. They usually consist of circuits, sprints, core, etc. There are also Saturday morning workouts and Sunday pool workouts. I feel wicked strong!

With the exception of the pool workouts I've REALLY been enjoying everything that I've been doing. I long ago accepted the fact that I will never enjoy pool workouts. I sink like a rock and am not the greatest swimmer in general (in camp I always cheated to pass my swimming tests), so my weekly bout of spitting out water and gasping for air is usually pretty traumatizing. Who knows, maybe I'll eventually learn to stay afloat in my time at K-State.

Epic Beginnings

So, I've decided that since I am no longer seeing most of my loyal followers on a weekly basis, I needed to create a blog to chronicle my training and adventures. I hope to stay fairly regular with my posts, but seeing as how I won't be competing for a few months, chances are that there won't be much to write about for a while. What I will be writing about is my meet results, training, and of course any occasional funny encounters I have while living here in Kansas. I welcome any feedback my readers have for me, I want this blog to be as inclusive as possible.

Really, I just sort of plunged into this move. I knew it was the right move for my career at this point. It was certainly one of the harder things I've ever had to do seeing as how I absolutely love Boston and my AMAZING friends and family that all live nearby. However, in order to improve I needed a new training environment with training partners, structure, and fewer distractions. After talking to just about every heptathlete I know, all signs pointed to K-State.

I suppose I should start at the beginning of my journey. I left Vermont on December 31st and after a string of goodbyes all the way down the east coast I finally arrived in Manhattan a week later. In an attempt to combat boredom I roadtriped with a squash my friend Erica and I made and named Carlos - I must say it worked. Just having an excuse to take breaks along the way and take pictures made the 28hour trip much more bearable. If you want to see all the pictures of my trip checkout my facebook page, or contact me and I'll email them out to you.

When I first arrived in Manhattan, it was bigger than I expected. It is a college town with tons of school spirit. After about a week, I realized that the town is not a big as I originally thought; it has every chain store you've ever heard of (and a few you haven't; Conoco? Old Chicago?), but you can drive from one side of town to the other in less than ten minutes. I am living with a fellow heptathlete, Bettie Wade, who has been awesome so far. We deffinitely have a similar sense of humor, which should make for an interesting and fun season.

My first order of business (after stocking the kitchen with chicken and peanut butter of course) was to visit the track. I had an idea of what to expect since I've seen athletes who train at K-State doing out-of-the-ordinary warm ups with stacks of paper in their hands at competitions before, but this was entirely different. The track was packed with student athletes doing exercises ranging from crawling along the track on all fours to climbing and twisting on metal contraptions to rain dancing, but each and everyone of them was toting a binder complete with about 200 different warmups and workouts. I was immediately intrigued and excited to start training. Coach said I could start on the following Monday, in the meantime I discovered the town and bonded with my roommate's pet rat Mousey.

Thanks for reading, more to come soon...