Great opportunity often comes with even greater sacrifice...

We have all had our ups and downs in life regardless of the roads that we have chosen or the social plus and minuses that we may or may not have been given when we arrived on the earth. However, it is what one often does with his or her life that has the greatest impact on those around them. In my short 27 years of life so far I have had more reasons too quite track than I have had to continue and thankfully for the right people at the right times in my development along with the unconditional support of my parents I have been able to continue and better myself.

Every athlete regardless of opportunity or ability will face times, when the motivation to improve or the clarity of their goals becomes clouded and misguided, the days when the will to improve is silenced by the need to be content. The drive to be greater than you were, is replaced with the thought of simple self gratitude. These are the phases that we all go through from time to time as athletes, the pressure {often internal} to be great becomes a burden so heavy that you wish that even for a moment you could pass it off to another the way that Atlas passed the weight of the sky and earth to Hercules. I personally have gone through this very scenario only recently, the feeling that I am not clear in my path and that my goals are not fixed in my mind’s eye. Life gets in the way of training and motivation takes a back seat to other things going on. It is during these times that you need to step back and reevaluate where you are in your life and are you happy?

If you are a college athlete, are you taking care of the details? Are you fulfilling your commitment to your team, your family {not everyone has a full} your coach, your school? Are you doing what you need to do to be the best? Is your social pouring its self into your responsibilities, and if it is, are you suffering to the point that on meet day some "dark horse" is going to tear you a new ass?

If you are one of the few post colligate athletes out there trying to make it to the next level, are you being honest with yourself and your time? If you move 3000 miles away from home and force your self to live along the poverty line, are you making the best of the time that you are given? Are you really there to achieve a goal that is real or are you looking for an excuse not to grow up and move positively forward with your life?

As an athlete in the sport of track and field that I love, these are the realities that we must be ready to face. Very few of use are going to make a living playing our sport. As the Canadian national champion this year I received no prize money, no national funding. NIKE hooked all the gold medalists up with a really sweet watch however. If you are still in college, on scholarship respect the magnitude of the opportunity for it may the only time in your life that you get payed for being an athlete, and without preaching an education is a payment that is often hard to measure in financial value. If you are willing to sacrifice so much for something that is not even guaranteed, don’t waste it, and please don’t waste the time of those that work so hard to help you succeed.

Well with that said let us move onto what we have been doing this week!

For those of you that haven’t figured it out yet I am a huge weight lifting and exercise fan. I will be involved with strength and conditioning long after I am done with track and field that is for certain. I love the iron and to be honest. My attitude toward the weight room has changed a lot over the years. I went through the Gold’s phase in highschool where the gym was where the girls were and muscles were for show more than go. After that I trained with Bud Rasmussen at North Idaho College, and I trained with the mentality of a 18-19 year old. " You want me to train for seven hours? No problem, pass me that Cadillac I think I can lift it." Than it was off to Wyoming, where strength was a result of massive volume and time spent. Nothing was too heavy after a while, but I remember a workout on a Sunday following a two-day weight pentathlon. I hit 600x6 all to parallel in the squat. I was quite high on the hog, until Jason Hammond belted up right behind me and blasted 650 for six! Now much older and much more traveled, I train under the education of Jud Logan. If you talk to us one on one you soon realize that the paths to this point in the weight room have not been that much different, he just got to the "good" information long before I ever did...but yet he came across it around the same age as I did. Now training is simply science, the body is a system of checks and balances that you need to manipulate to create a desired effect. That is science and that it how we do things here, and that is how I will do things from here on out. I still think that there is times for a huge volume. Often greater than many coaches realize, I think that there is a time for grass roots power and there is defiantly a place for conventional bodybuilding. The key is how? And to me that is the art.

This week, we hit the throws pretty hard, training Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. I had a lot to work on this week and the extra days made a huge difference, regardless of the 25-degree weather that we had to contend with. We have begun or range throwing sessions and I have had some specific work with the chain to fix some "bad" movement patterns as of late and it really payed off. In the weight room we are in the middle of a front squat, progressive range clean cycles along with a butt kicker of an upper body cycle. This week we started the upper with a two-wave progression in the bench working up to some high end numbers, I went 365lbs double and a 385lbs single {it was supposed to be a double}, I was happy considering I only bench about nine weeks a year. In the five position clean we worked up to some sold weights, I went 130kg on set five of five. The next two workouts of the week repeat, with the bench being a rep test, I went 275x14 and in the progressive range cleans it was 10 kilos down for 25 reps! There are some people in our program that are really coming alive and its exciting to see what happens.

Well that is it this week, our colligates are a month out from the great opener and I am exactly two months to the day! I will be opening my indoor season at Eastern Michigan University in January.