China6

Finals Day. Am I ready? Short answer: no. I couldn't find the mythic 'ice tub' that was in the rehab building. Maybe it was a language barrier or bad charades skills, but they insisted they didn't have one. So I was still reeling from Tuesday. I have never done triple jump 2 times in 3 days before, so I didn't know what to do really. I emailed Muhammad's old Coach and he told me to jog and stretch and ice. I lazied around all day before competition. Trying to minimize any further muscle fatigue.

I went by an exhibit they had set up at the village, showing pictures of Shenzhen's modern cityscape. Then I went to the Chinese learning Center. I learned the basics of pinyin, basically how to read Chinese in English lettering. Some of the sounds were so tricky and similar to each other. Tiny tongue differences. They had this cool touchscreen thing that you could speak into and they would rate your pronunciation. I also had a person there helping me. It was pretty packed in that little room with people trying to learn. I got thru the basics of pinyin, and then began to learn some phrases. I thought, "yea, now im gonna be able to use my vocab on people". Too bad i forgot most of my words. And then I tried to use one I remembered and they had no idea what i was saying :(.

Competition time. It started off bad because our trainer was with the 2 golfers we had competing that day. So i didn't get my pain killers when I wanted to. Had to get some from the Australians. Tasted like tic tacs. Urrrr, sabotage. Jk. But I have never felt that bad in a competition before. the whole time i just felt 'off'. Mechanics just not firing at the same time. Usually when i can still feel my body suffer through triple jump, its a small meet, or a meet where there is no pressure. But my heart was beating something fierce and I still felt crummy. My new goal was to not get 12th, otherwise finals wouldn't matter. My first jump was a foul, I ran thru the last phase, didn't complete the jump. Second jump was a safety one 15.63. Third jump i tried to blast out with all i had, maybe was too wild though. 15.49. The judges didn't even let me watch the rest of the triple jump as the top 8 earned 3 more jumps, Evora of course being one of them. This messed up my chances of getting a picture with him afterwards as I had imagined. I ended up watching the final jumps from the stands, just as a regular Cretan. I was still satisfied with my effort. 16.06m 2 days ago. After all, the trips to Puerto Rico and China were icing on the cake to my successful NCAA All-American, ACC Champion season. Salaams.