This is the last post for this forum! The end of the season is finally here! What a ride is has been.
In the 110H, mission accomplished! State champion, but not without obstacles along the way (not the hurdle type!) About 10 days from state finals, his back got pretty tight and we had to only do treatments until state finals. Once there, he had a hard time warming up, even with my treatments at the team tent area. He felt loose overall, so he just ran races. He would sit and hang out and then go run. Between races I would treat him again. In the end he didn’t run great at all, wasn’t able to get his fast starts and won by a small margin.
He then later took 2nd in the 300H and I could tell it started to bug him again.
He is off until he leaves for college in the fall. No summer plans training wise. He put in a solid 9 months this year, 1 month more than last year.
As a coach of a successful athlete, it was quite the challenge I did not expect. Too many things along the way to mention, but I think a line from Charlie sums it up, the road to success is more fun than the road to stay there (Ange, I think this was the line!) The indoor season was fantastic, but the mental aspect of being labeled a national champion and then having to deal with uncontrollables such as weather for training, weather for meets, lack of competition for most of the year etc kept leading to frustration on his end which did impact me as well.
He will certainly be missed around here and had achieved a local celebrity status of sorts. Kids asking for training advice, people coming up with all kinds of achievements (world national indoor world record holder), kids wanting to hold his blocks during warm up starts, parents talking to him during warm up at meets etc. He leaves holding both hurdle school records and was part of all 3 sprint relay school records (4x1, 4x2, 4x4). He had the ability to break the 200 and 100 records as well, but the opportunity to do it was never there.
For me, I have grown to really appreciate the beauty of the hurdle events, and almost prefer to coach hurdlers, whereas before I coached mainly sprinters.