Michael Auslen geared up for some pole vaulting action before track practice at Arvada West April 7. Photo by Ashley Pajor.
It’s been a long time since I last had the opportunity to participate in one of RVHS’s wonderful sporting practices and, to be honest, I wasn’t completely confident in my decision to do girls’ track. Those who recall my first column (cross country) will remember that I am not athletic, as I continually assert, but even more specifically, I do not run.
I abhor running.
Nevertheless, track went off relatively well.
At the beginning of practice we gathered near the math hall and did two laps of some combination of stairs and running through classroom wings. I must express some pride in my ability to stay near the head of the pack with my faithful partner in journalism Ashley Pajor (who is, incidentally, a member of the track team), but, near the end of the second lap I found myself near the rear of the pack.
In any case, I then went outside to throw discus and do triple jump. I started with the wimpy fake disc, and didn’t do
Michael Auslen trying discus for the first time
so hot, but I did graduate to the real deal one pound disc. Though discus wasn’t my strong point by any means, if I do say so myself, triple jump is possible the most fun thing I’ve done with any sports team during practice to date. It took some practice to figure it out, but even Ashley said I wasn’t too bad. I suppose now would be the appropriate time to do a bit of shameless promotion. I have put videos online of discus, triple jump and my pole vaulting adventures at www.rvhsnews.com.
At that point, I was supposed to do sprinting, but that group of girls was finished, so we cut the day short.
However, after spring break, I got back together with Ashley to do the one thing that, from the beginning of planning my track practice misadventures, I had vehemently opposed: pole vaulting. Somehow, I am not comfortable with the idea of holding a long pole and running straight towards a pile of mats, only to hoist myself onto said mats using said pole. It seems unnatural and, frankly, extremely dangerous. But I reluctantly agreed to accompany Ashley to Arvada West for one day of practice. Unfortunately, there were other people practicing there, so I didn’t get quite as many tries doing the real deal as I would have liked, although maybe that was for the best. For starters, Ashley taught me
how to swing forward using the pole. I was instructed to thrust one knee forward and have the trail leg follow behind, a move I quickly likened to Peter Pan. But my trip to Never Neverland was regrettably cut short by my own failure at athletics.
As Ashley added steps to my travesty of an attempt at pole vaulting, I quickly worsened in my ability to do any of it. In fact, even things I had mastered earlier seemed to disappear from my short list of things I can do which require insane amounts of hand-eye coordination.
I did finally get a couple of tries on the pole, the first of which was an utter failure (but it was all Ashley’s fault for not fixing my hand position), but the second of which sort of worked. I say sort of because I only made it onto the mats with very little air time or height, but I say worked because I actually made it onto the mats without injuring myself, which was above my own expectations. Though my time with the girls’ track team wasn’t nearly as physically strenuous as some of my other practices, it was very difficult. I spent most of my time doing field events and found that it takes a serious amount of practice and dedication to succeed. These girls (and, I suppose, their male counterparts) push themselves throughout the entire season to achieve as close as they can come to perfection. There’s always some little tweak to make to the routine or a few more inches that can be thrown or jumped. So, though
I may not have been tested as much as usual, I did come out of girls’ track with a few very beneficial things:
I now understand the difficulty of field events, which I once would have considered not altogether difficult to master.
I have conquered my fear of pole vaulting, and what a short-lived fear it was.
I have, as usual provided you with some sort of entertainment at my pitiful athletic attempts, this time in a video format online.
Don’t forget to check out videos and photos at http://www.rvhsnews.com/michaelauslen/girls-track-anticipating-doom, http://www.rvhsnews.com/michaelauslen/girls-track-still-breathing-hard-part-i-recap, http://www.rvhsnews.com/michaelauslen/girls-track-will-i-stab-my-foot-part-ii-pre-practice, http://www.rvhsnews.com/michaelauslen/girls-track-i-pole-vaulted-part-ii-recap-and-video.