The weekend

So my top level 10 has a pretty tough bar routine and has been struggling with it. It is very frustrating for her, she is very driven and does not do well with anything less than perfect. The routine is much harder than it needs to be per the rules of USA gymnastics. That doesn't mean she doesn't need to do a routine so hard, just means she goes above and beyond, and to be a top athlete you have to.

So not only is her routine really hard, and she is struggling with it, but we have told her that she has to compete it at a very important meet for the team. It is called Super Team and is hosted by World Class gymnastics just over the river in Illinois. We were going to use another athlete but that athlete injured herself a couple weeks ago and is now out for the rest of the season. Now it is on our level 10 who will also have to compete most if not all the other events at this meet as well, which means she may have to do two full meets in two days. It is not an enviable task, but is an honor to compete.

Our athlete on Saturday was having a bad day, and seemed to be letting it be known how she did not want the honor of representing our team on all the events, especially on bars, since she had a high chance of missing that routine. Her and I got into it, or I should say I got angry with her and let her know what I thought about how she was acting. Now all stories have two sides to them and I don't know what she would say about the event, but I felt like she was not acting like the leader she was, and was giving the other team members reason to also not want to compete for the team at Super Team.

To me it looked like I pissed off my athlete for saying what I said. She did not talk to me but she did not get back on the event for a few min, and it looked like she might have had some tears in her eyes. This is not what I was going for, but sometimes every athlete might need a little kick in the ass. And it seamed like that maybe for this kid this was the time. We went to our next event, which was vault, and I, still angry from bars, told the athlete she was going to do her new vault onto harder mats that usual, as well as higher. I didn't care how she felt about it, she was going to do it.

This is how that went.

This was the best she had ever done this vault, and just in time it seams because she has planned to do it in three weeks at the Gym Quarters invite. I felt bad for getting on this kid because she is a great kid. She works so hard, and never complains. But like I said maybe there was a silver lining.

After gym I left right away from Columbia IL about 30 min away. I had scheduled at power test and I like to do them down there since there is almost no traffic, no stop signs, or lights. The test is taken from Training and Racing with Power, and consists of a 5 min interval, 2 x 1 min intervals, 3 x 20 sec intervals, and a 20 min interval. All of these are ALL OUT, get the highest power numbers you can. My first interval did not go as good as I thought it should have so I changed the screens on my Garmin 500 so I could only see the time I had left on each intervals and just hammered. It turned out very good once I got home and looked at all the numbers. I am much higher than I was last year and feeling good that all the work that I have been doing is working out.

After that I raced home to have dinner with my wife and her parents for her birthday. We went to a great place called Jimmy's on the Park in Clayton. Wow, it was awesome! Katie found it and Clayton was having this thing called Clayton restaurant week where you got a 3 course meal for like $25. The food was unbelievable at this price! If you want to go just make sure you make a reservation because it was packed. Then this morning we woke up and ran over to Half & Half, also in Clayton. Katie and I love this place, but we hadn't always. The first few times we went it took way too long and the service was terrible. They seem to have their shit together though and everything on the menu is must have.

After breakfast I had to go and meet some teammates and other guys for a looong ride in the O'Fallon MO area. This is a ride I have done a few times and I have never done it well. There are huge climbs and I am more of a rock than a mountain goat. Once again I was the worst climber of the group and spent a lot of my time chasing the group down. The ride was 5+ hours, 88 miles, and over 10,000 feet of climbing. This time though I made it over 60 miles before I started to bonk, last time I only made it 40. So again at 60 miles I started stuffing my mouth with food. I was able to get out of the bonk, but I really have to work on it not happening in the first place. I can really see what I have to do though to ride with these guys. This is their back yard and they know every hill and turn. The only way I am going to start to be able to ride with these guys is to keep going. One of these times I will hang the whole way. It might be a long time in the future, but you need to have goals right?

Katie's Bday and other fun

Yesterday was Katie's birthday. I remember when we first started dating and I was trying to brag that I remembered what it was. It is easy, 1, 2, 3, but for some reason I said 1, 2, 6, :-/. I haven't lived that one down yet. I am almost never around for Katie's birthday, most of the time I am gone for work, and back in college I was competing. I think in that last ten years this was the second time I was around for her birthday. So I suck at being here. I don't know how to surprise her, I can almost never keep a secret from her. I am going to try to plan a vacation for us and surprise her with it. She knows we are going to go someplace but doesn't know when or where. I think I will be lucky if I can pull it off. I don't know what that is about.

Over the years I have liked to buy Katie some nice jewelry. It was something that my grandfather said to me about how he would duck into the jewelry store on his way home some days and buy my grandmother something nice. I thought that was so amazing to be some successful that he could do that, and I wanted to be like that. I am not there yet but I have gotten her some small things. This year I got her some nice diamond stud earings. They are not big and unless you look you might not ever see them but she likes them. And it makes me happy that I can get them for her. We also went out for breakfast in the morning and we went to dinner that night. In between we went shopping for most of the day. It was nice just hanging out all day.

I road for about an hour yesterday on the trainer and was planning on riding again today. I have been battling something again though and had to leave work early. So I have taken the day off the bike, again. The kids at the gym have been passing around something and I just caught it. I really need to do something about getting sick so often though. It has never been this bad, and I am not even training that hard. Once I start doing 15+ hour weeks I am going to really be hurting if I can't hold off these colds, or flu, or whatever.

I went in last night to work with an athlete of mine to learn a new release move. She has come along really quickly, going from drills to this in about 2 weeks.

This is really pretty good except for not catching the bar. Most girls don't ever do this skill this well. Over the next year I hope this will get even better. It helps that she is a great bar swinger and very strong. With some courage and determination she will be catching this next weekend in Collinsville IL at the Gateway Challenge.

Just keep truckin

Spent a couple days in Indianapolis Indiana this weekend for the Circle of Stars gymnastics competition. This is a huge meet, about 3000 girls competing. This year they had to move their venue because of this years Super Bowl. They were setting stuff up the whole time we were there. The hotel we were staying at, the JW Marriott, had a image of the Lombardi trophy being put on the front of the build. It went from almost the first floor to the top floor. The hotel was awesome, I have never had a corner room that both walls were made of all glass. It was a great view.

A couple of my girls were competing on Saturday night and they were heading up to Indy on Friday night. On their way there was a big ice storm and they were stuck in Vandailia, IL all night waiting for the highway to reopen. One of the girls had to sleep in her car. It was not a good situation for girls looking to have great competitions the next day. On my way up the next day we counted 25 separate accident sites, some looked like the people involved did not survive. Most of the vehicles on the side were semi trucks, there were a few with cargo scattered all over the highway, some were upside down, and some were so far off the road I don't know how they got there. It was really sort of ere, it made me think of the images from when I was a kid of the bombed out cars and trucks in Iraq when Saddam's men were fleeing Saudi Arabia.

Both athletes ended up doing well. The girl who spent the night in her car is still coming back from a back injury and did as well as we hoped she would. Our other athlete hit 3 out of 4 events only missing her one event that we had upgraded a lot for this meet. Not only did this one spend two days traveling to the meet though, she also has bronchitis or something like that and was half dead the whole time. So all things considering, I have to be happy about how they did. This morning I had another group of 8 girls competing. All these girls have been training really hard and were looking pretty prepared for this meet, so my assistant coach and I were pretty excited for this weekend. It was a pretty good meet hitting at least 75% of all our routines. This might not sound great but for this time of the year it is. Last year I remember missing almost every bar routine at this meet.

The one really bad thing at the meet was I had one athlete get injured. It was so strange, she was warming up her bar dismount, landed perfectly and when she was walking away she said she felt like she just "tweaked" her back. A couple minutes later she was crying and this girls does not cry, or I have never seen her cry. We ended up having to scratch her from the rest of the meet which really sucks as she is one of our best gymnasts. She is okay, but her back spasmed so bad that she just froze up. Turns out she has been dealing with a sciatic nerve problem and we didn't know about it. When she landed it must have moved something wrong and it flared up bad. I hope she is back quick though. In the end this group ended up placing 2nd as a team. That is a great result for us in such a big meet so early in the year. I am starting to feel like we are on the right track and we are going to do some awesome stuff coming up.

Our next three meets are all in town competitions, and then we go to Minnesota, and then our state championships. The season is going to go really fast now, in no time I will be racing at Froze Toes, then State, then I'll be out at the USA gymnastics National Championships, and it will be done like that. Time flies when you are having fun.

The big goal

I gave the girls a big goal the other day. In any consecutive 7 day period, if they are able to put together an 80% hit percentage I will buy them a pizza party and frozen yogurt. Nothing gets these girls motivated like food. For me and a lot of the coaches I know it is not how high an athlete scores during the year, it is how often they hit their routines. This is because that is what these girls can control, no one can control the score.

I was thinking about scores the other day and how much prestige is put on judges in the sport. The funny thing is I don't know a single judge that that's what they DO. They all have jobs and judging is a hobby, or something they do because they love gymnastics. Yet we as coaches, parents, or athletes look to them for all the answers.

It is the coaches though that spend all their time in the gym, learning the skills, the routines, and the requirements. We know how a skill should be done, or how a skill can be done. I don't know how infuriating it is when a judge tells me how a skill should be done and they are wrong. A lot of the time they are wrong about skills that they don't see often and don't get reviewed in their meetings. There have been times over the years when the technique of certain skills have been changed because judges have it wrong. Mostly it has been when girls start to do skills that men were doing and don't use the same technique. For the most part men always have technique pretty well figured out by the time a skill gets to the girls. Why not use what they have taken so much time to figure out.

My desire to be on the bike is really starting to ramp up. I spent over 3 hours on the trainer today and only the last 10 min of my 2.5 hour tempo interval was tough. I did watch some Grey's Anatomy that Katie had rented from Blockbuster. That helped a lot, sometimes the bike races get a little boring on the long stretches before guys really start racing.

My teammate Rob got the blog part of QMC's webpage up and running today. Check it out, Matt James and Rob will be getting it all going really soon.

http://quantummesacycles.com/blog/

This is the site of the meet my gymnastics team hosts at the Double Tree in Chesterfield. Before setup.

We have to put plastic on the ground to protect the tennis courts from chalk. We are lucky to get an army of kids who need volunteer hours to lay this stuff out.

This is the final setup. There are 3 girls gym and one boys gym. We had 1500 kid competing in here and over 5000 spectators running though here. And for the first year we charged no admissions. It was a huge success.

Busy busy busy

So I don't even know when the last time I wrote on here was. I have been running around like crazy doing......stuff.

Last weekend was my gym's meet called Meet me in St Louis, around 1500 athletes from all over the Midwestern United States. It is one of the largest coed meets in the US, maybe the the largest. My entire gym has been working their asses off getting things ready. The meet went great with almost no glitches. Almost is not good enough though and we always work hard to make things perfect. One cool thing was we were able to set up 3 girls gym, 6 sets of bars, 6 beams, 6 vaults, 3 40'x40' floors, 3 tumble strips, and a boys gym, high bar, parallel bars, ring tower, and pommel horse, in 4 hours. We took it all down in 3 hours and 23 min. In the past it took me the same time to do just one gym. I have to give a big shout out to the guys at United Athletic International for all their great work. If you host a meet you should really give them a look.

I have also been working on getting my cycling team their new kit and equipment. It is really just a lot of busy work but it takes time. I don't have any cool programs to keep track of this crap and I am not the best at remembering things so I double, and triple check things to make sure I have it all right. Then on top of it I have to train and hang out with my wife. For a guy who has a short work week I still have no time for everything.

I do have something really cool in the pipeline though that is super top secret and could be a big deal in the world of gymnastics. One of those building a better mouse trap types of things. From what I hear that is the most common way to be successful in business. Fingers crossed.

Training has not been as consistant as I want it to be right now but whatever. I have still been hitting the weights pretty hard and it makes it hard to do long miles. I am going to do another 2 weeks after of lifting and then it will be nothing but big miles. Last week I was able to do three, 3+ hours of riding which was tough to do with two days of heavy lifting. I missed riding yesterday from exhaustion, spent most of the day was spent sleeping. I don't really know why I am so tired every year after this meet. It seems like all I do is just sit there and move athletes rotations around. Could just be from stress I guess.

I need to really take advantage of this great weather this last week. Can't last forever, and I sure it is just going to be colder longer into the spring.

New Quantum Mesa Cycles kit design