Pole vaulting is hard.
After running as fast as you possibly can for about 24 steps, you raise one end of a 15 foot fiberglass pole over your head while simultaneously slamming the other end of the pole into a metal box set into the ground. As the pole strikes the box, you throw your feet vertically into the air and throw your head vertically to the ground, inverting your body on the pole. At that moment, you pull back on the pole, creating a bend that will theoretically propel you over the bar when the pole violently unbends.
I competed in this sport for two years in high school. I was good enough to win a bronze medal in the district championship during my junior year. Of course, my school’s teeny tiny division included many schools that didn’t even have a pole vaulting team.
So take my success with a grain of salt.
Still, it’s not a sport for the faint of heart.
Of all the video I wish I had from the past, a recording of my pole vaulting exploits might the bit of video I wish I had the most.
One of my book ideas is to spend a year trying to do things I once did in my youth before it becomes physically impossible for me to do.
Joining a high school pole vaulting team for a season is one of those things. Unlike most sports, which can be played long after your high school and college career has ended, pole vaulting is a sport that can’t be played recreationally. Once your career is finished, you never vault again.
Unless I find a way to join a team.
When I was vaulting, the hardest part of every day was not the hours of practice, the launching of oneself in directions other than the mats, or the endless series injuries that inevitably occur when you throw your body 14 feet into the air.
Snapping the pole was bad. I did that once and it took me weeks to will myself to bend the pole again.
Still, even that wasn’t the worst.
The worst was setting up and breaking down the pole vaulting pit every day. Removing the half dozen mats from the basement storage area, manipulating them up stairs not made to accommodate their size, and carrying them down a hallway, across a parking lot, and onto the grassy pole vault area.
Then came the stanchions, which held the bar in place, which were just as heavy and cumbersome.
It took us about 45 minutes just to set up the pit before we could even begin practicing, at which point we were already exhausted. And it took just as long to break everything down and put it away at the end of practice.
As a sprinter, I donned my shoes, ran on the track, took a shower, and went home.
As a pole vaulter, I spent more time setting up than actually practicing. Oftentimes the sun was setting by the time the equipment was returned to the storage room.
Which is why I was appalled to find the pole vault pit at Berlin High School looking like this. Stanchion permanently affixed to the ground, and standing beside the pit, just a few feet away, a shipping container containing the mats, poles, and other equipment required to practice.
No basement storeroom. No winding set of stairs. No enormous parking lot to cross.
It’s ridiculous.
These pole vaulters have it easy. They don’t understand that vaulting is about inconvenience, hardship, and petty annoyance. Pole vaulters start their workouts later than anyone else and end practice well after everyone else has gone home. This is the plight of the pole vaulter, The effort required to prepare for practice somehow dulls the aches and pains associated with actually practicing.
At least that’s what I thought.
I can’t believe how good these vaulters have it.
Jealousy is an emotion that I almost never experience, but discovering this pole vaulting set up last week, I was jealous beyond compare.
Also ready to give pole vaulting another try.
