My 2012 London Olympic Games train left the station last Saturday. In other words, not only did I begin my 2012 season but I began down the final stretch towards London and the Olympics. Considering that I missed qualifying for Beijing, this has been four years in the making. With that said, and although every track and field athlete has their eyes squarely set on London, I try and will continue to try very hard not to get ahead of myself. I’m still committed to taking this year one day, one competition, one training session, one lift and one jump at a time. Still, it was fun to get the ball rolling even if it was only slightly in the grand scheme of things.

To start the day on Saturday, I ran the 60 meter dash for the first time in six years. That fact alone should really let you know that this was little more than a ‘training competition’. To be honest though, while I didn’t run under 7 seconds which was my goal, the race was a lot of fun and I can live with 7.05 considering we haven’t actually done any speed work yet in practice and probably won’t for some time. I’m hoping coach will let me run it again before the indoor season is out though and I’ll be shooting for something in the 6.80s. Check out the race below and try not to laugh to hard.

My transition out of my drive phase was horrible so my hips were too low and a bit behind me, and I definitely didn’t run through the line but I suppose my sprinting is even more of a work in progress than my triple jumping.

Over on the runway, I planned to take only two jumps and ended up taking three because my first jump (which came out to a respectable 17.05m, give or take a bit, when my coach measured it after the competition) was just barely a foul. If I were the official, I would have thrown the white flag though — you check the tape. Not only was last Thursday the first time coach and I had truly worked on my approach since Daegu in August, but as you can tell from the fact that I switched technique between jumps 2 and 3 and the jump phase on my first jump looking a bit crazy, I haven’t done any technique work at all since August either.

Believe it or not, I’m pretty satisfied with my jumps. You guys know that is pretty rare. I didn’t continue pushing my approach through the board, my timing was off and I was impatient on all three of my phases and I have no idea what was going on with my arms in my hop phases (I should probably figure that out FAST) but the jumps felt easy, my speed wasn’t too bad on the runway considering how early is it and I came away healthy. As far as shaking the rust off goes, there isn’t much more that I could have asked for!

Next up is the Collegiate Invitational at the Armory this weekend where I’ll be taking just a couple jumps like last weekend and then it’s looking like I’ll head over to France (Liévin) for the Meeting Pas de Calais which will be my last time jumping in competition until the World Indoor Champs.

Full speed ahead.