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Coach diary: W is for...

Welcome to my world – Monday August 30, 2010

I’ve come up with a few ‘W’ words to explain some of the situations experienced by travelling athletes.

World events - I have already mentioned the issues we had with the Gay Games a couple of weeks ago. Access to anything at all was almost impossible. This week, we experienced the magnitude of a local football match. Koln FC was playing someone midweek. Their stadium is between the track and the pool and the only trams that go there are the same ones we catch to training. It’s not a case of all roads lead to Rheinenergie Stadion. We waited for seven or eight trams before one came along that we thought we could squeeze three of us onto. There was me, Sal and Dani Samuels. The fans were drinking already and getting a bit obnoxious about not being able to get to the game. This is all two hours before kick-off and the tram trip only takes seven minutes.

Weekends - The tracks, both indoors and outdoors are closed on weekends, as is the gym. Not a lot of athletes have two consecutive days off in their training schedules. We are not affected this weekend or next, as Sally is competing and we will only need a pool, which is another 'W' problem we’re facing, but more about that later. I have already spoken to the university people and made a special request for access for three hours for Australian athletes on Saturday, September 11, when we’ll have a large team in Cologne (GER).

Week-day coaching clinics - Most school students throughout Europe and the UK have been on school holidays. The university runs school coaching camps each day, and because the weather has been foul, most of the activities have been conducted at the indoor track. Given this is where we want to train as well, we must wait until after 4pm to get some space on the track. You probably think this is a huge whinge, but some athletes thrive on routine and Sally is one such athlete. At home we train at 2.30pm for afternoon sessions, except Mondays, which is 3pm. The other problem is that the uni canteen closes at 3pm, and if I’m going to get the six buckets of ice into the ice bath, I have to be there by 2.30pm to start the trips from canteen to the showers in the gym.

Weather - Although we face the same inclemencies at home from time to time, it can be more of a frustration when you are in a foreign environment, don’t actually know where other venues are and don’t speak the language. We have yet to find an indoor pool which is heated and which is deep enough to do our sprints the way we do, and which will allow me to coach from the pool deck. For our track session though, we are extremely fortunate to have an indoor straight with six lanes for when it’s raining outside. Here is the forecast for the rest of this week...

Extended forecast
Updated: 2:00AM CEST on August 31, 2010

Ohhhh to be in Queensland right now!!

Workmen - When the mower man decides it’s time to mow the infield, it doesn’t matter to him that the current world champion has just arrived at the track for a throwing session. So Dani turns around, catches the tram back home, does some washing and goes back to the track in the afternoon. This just means she has to throw and then do gym straight after.

Winter closures – Our pool is closing on Sunday for the next several months. I know I’ve whinged about how cold the water is and about changing sessions so Sally doesn’t freeze to death waiting for the four minutes of recovery to tick over. But it’s 'our' pool, we know where it is, they let me in for free and I can time her reps and recoveries and it’s next to 'our' track. The gatekeeper very generously handed us a brochure about city pools, but we’ll have to find someone to translate for us.

Friday, August 26

The train trip yesterday from Cologne to Brussels (BEL) was very easy and very pleasant, unlike the actual boarding of the train. In a very untypical display of German efficiency, organisation and precision, it was chaos. We found our wagon number and waited patienly for travellers to alight. We were seats 75 and 77.  They were side-by-side, so I don’t really understand the missing number, but there’s a very good reason for this I’m sure. We entered the wagon at the No. 1 end though. There were plenty of passengers looking for low seat numbers who entered the other end of the carriage. Therein lies the chaos. People trying to pass people in both directions in a very narrow passageway. Sally got to our seats first, then promptly stood in the aisle and stopped the people behind her so that I could move three more pairs of seats to reach mine. Even that was chaotic. Still, we were comfortably seated long before many others who were still jammed in the passageway when the train made its rapid departure. It took another 20 minutes to get everyone in our wagon seated.

It was good to have leg room, to see some countryside and small towns and to just be somewhere different. There were three very short stops and then we eased down from 200+kms per hour to slowly crawl into the main Brussels station. A volunteer from Memorial van Damme (MVD), which is the traditional name of the meet, met us at the station and once we‘d picked up a sprinter from Finland, he drove us to the Sheraton Hotel. Luxury!!

Sally and I have a shared room and we each have a queen size bed.The room is very Sheraton, very nice. The meals are all provided and the food is plentiful. Wireless internet access is free from the lobby, so we’ve been down with our laptops, Skyped our families, checked our emails and of course, been on Facebook.

I was particularly keen to get onto my daughter via Skype, as there has been a trauma unfolding over the past 30-odd hours on their farm just outside Mossman, in far-north Queensland.  Just before Christmas last year I gave my three young grand-children a puppy. It’s a little Maltese-Jack Russell cross. They already have two dogs buy they’re farm dogs, much-loved, but big outdoors type dogs. I wanted to give them a little house puppy which could sleep on the ends of their beds and cuddle up to them in the lounge. Sasha has become a very special part of their family and has become so close to Mika, one of the farm dogs, that she sleeps curled up between her legs and her belly outside each night. It’s Sasha’s choice. On Thursday Sasha was bitten by a snake, an Eastern Brown, which is poisonous. Mika attacked and killed the snake to try to save Sasha. Luckily, this all happened quite close to the main farm house and Sasha was whisked off to town to the vet. Anti-venom at $700 a pop was the agreed treatment, and the vet advised the family that only time would tell but that the next 24 hours would be critical. Three distraught littlies, with lots of tears and questions about dying, and more tears and more questions about treatment.

Tassie is our only grandson and has just turned eight. He is quite a little artist and has drawn a picture of Sasha with the drip in her little doggie arm. Denby, who will be 10 in November, asked her whole class to pray for Sasha during morning prayer at the little St. Augustine’s primary school in Mossman, far north Queensland. Xanthe is five and a half and just wants Sasha home.

I had a good two-hour walk around the shopping area near the hotel this morning. I got lost but luckily the hotel is right beside the Hilton and the Crowne Plaza, so when I asked directions I mentioned all three and was understood.

The women’s hurdles was one of the last events on the timetable in Brussels, scheduled to start at 9:20pm. The last bus left the hotel at 7pm, so we headed out to the stadium. The bus stopped first at the warm-up area to drop athletes off, then went on to the stadium to take the other people to their seats or to their jobs as officials. It was raining and we sheltered under a small 3mx3m quickshade for about half an hour, until it was time to start warming up. It was very cold and dismal.

The warm-up area was a synthetic grass football field and down the back straight was a wooden platform with mondo laid on it. There were hurdles and blocks supplied, which was good news. The rain stopped just before Sal started her warm-up, but the puddles on the mondo didn’t dry up at all. We swept the take-off area in front of each hurdle with a rubber broom to try to make it as safe as possible. Someone had put down tape marks for the hurdles on the wooden platform and this was a great help. The soccer field had a typical camber, so the mondo track ran uphill.  At one stage Perdita Felicien (CAN) commented on how hard she was working just to reach hurdles one and two. The girls had probably never run uphill over hurdles before. Still, it was the same situation for all of them, and they coped.

Sal completed her warm-up and waited at call room one for the bus ride to call room two. The other coaches and I weren’t allowed on the bus until the organisers were sure all eight girls were on and there were still spare seats.

Sal went off to call room two feeling very fast and full of confidence. I went to the allocated athlete/coach seating and took a few photos of the stadium for Sal on her camera. Paul, the agent who looks after a large number of the Jamaican athletes, commented that Sal looked very fast in her warm-up. It’s good to get comments like that from knowledgeable people. Sometimes, when you’re so close to the action all the time, you start questioning whether you’re seeing what you’re seeing, or you’re hoping to see what you think you see!! Sounds weird.

I was positioned almost exactly head-on to lane five, where Sal was racing. The gun went off and she didn’t appear above the hurdles immediately and when she did, she looked awkward for the first few hurdles. By the second half of the race she was popping up because she was too close to the hurdles.

Sal placed second to Priscilla with times of 12.64 and 12.54 respectively. The wind was zero. As soon as Sal emerged from the post-event control area she told me her blocks had slipped.  Later in the night when we were able to check the result details, they showed a .160 reaction time. This is the worst reaction Sally has ever recorded and an indication that her back foot stayed with the blocks as they were slipping backwards. She was terribly disappointed because she felt in seriously good shape, faster than she had all season.

During the week, Sal had had several problems with blocks slipping. On Monday they slipped a bit more than 3cm. One of the German coaches offered to stand on her blocks and did so for the rest of the session. On Tuesday and Wednesday we used different blocks and a second set behind to attempt to keep them firmly wedged in the rubber surface. Sal is creating huge forces now, and we assumed that the indoor track at Cologne was wearing thin and the rubber was just no longer deep enough to hold the blocks.

However, it happened in the race. This created the situation where Sal was re-starting almost from a standing start, trying to play catch-up, trying desperately to create the speed she would need to win. Her mid-race data shows she made a pretty good fist of the task, but then she ended up too close to the hurdles through the latter part of the race. Very unforgiving this event.

When we talked the race through, Sal was quite happy with her resurrection, just terribly disappointed with the start. Where to from here?

In 2007 and 2008, we did an enormous amount of work on her starts with our Queensland Academy of Sport biomechanist, Jen Manning (now Hollier). There was also a lot of input from Mark Osbourne, the senior sports scientist at the QAS, and son of the very famous Australian coach, Norm. Over the years, we have made Sal stronger and faster, particularly at the start of her races, and she has been ‘almost’ unbeatable on the world stage in the first half of the hurdles races. Her blocks have always been on the lowest settings to create more force. This costs a little in time spent on the blocks, but that has improved immensely over the past three years. However... time for change! We have just four sessions before the Continental Cup on Sunday to make block changes. We’ve discussed what we’re going to do and how we’re going to go about it. There will definitely be some improvement after these few sessions and more to come with more practice over the following few weeks.

Day 1 of change... We have adjusted the back block up a notch and moved the block back a notch. After six starts this afternoon, some over a single hurdle, we’re ahead of where I thought we’d be on the change continuum. Sally feels “capable” with the new setting. At the risk of being howled down from tens of thousands of kilometers away by any of the athletes I’ve coached or any of the coaches I’ve ever put through coaching courses, I could almost say “comfortable”. I can hear you all exclaiming, “She said there should be no such word as ‘comfort’ in sprints or hurdles. If the athlete wants comfort, send them home to their lounge to watch DVDs.”

Stay tuned...

Sharon

PS: Sasha is recovering well from the snake bite and the vet has attributed this to the speedy action taken by our son-in-law, Woodsy. The fact that he grew up on the farm where he now lives with his young family means he brings a wealth of local knowledge to situations such as snake bites. Three extremely happy little grandkids and two very relieved parents.