This was my final submission for my Creative Nonfiction Writing course at Harvard.
I am a pole vaulter. I use the present tense even though I haven’t picked up a pole in 10 months because you sort of never stop having the mindset of a pole vaulter. It’s the mentality that running as fast as you can toward a metal box with the intention of slingshoting yourself into the air is a good idea. That type of reckless abandon and, let’s face it, insanity, sticks with you. So while I haven’t actually flung myself to new heights recently, vaulting hasn’t really left me.
I’ve always wanted long, soft hands, blessed with fingers that could find their way delicately around a piano, or that looked effortless when pulling the hair away from my face. Instead, my hands are small with nails that I bite mindlessly and calluses that have hardened over years of gripping carbon-fiber poles and gymnastics rings and weightlifting bars with sandpaper surfaces. I adorn them with rings and watches and hair ties, because if they can’t be beautiful then at least they can have character.
In hands, the space between the fingers seems to be often forgotten, unless filled by another’s fingers. The space between my thumb and forefinger, though, has served as a support and lever, snugly cradling the pole as I run, then knowing exactly when to tighten and grip, protecting me from an untimely fall. My hands really are the unsung heroes of my athletic feats, enduring the beatings with none of the praise.
The calluses will fade, though. I already feel them softening after months of healing, and part of me is disappointed in their newfound smoothness. Chalk no longer sticks in the creases of my hands after a difficult practice, and now when I pick up weights I feel my grip straining. In the webbing between my left thumb and forefinger though, there inhabits a permanent mark on my flesh.
A thin line of white skin arcs across the sensitive and otherwise melanin-rich epidermis. Bubbles of crunchy scar tissue line the old wound and if you look hard enough you can see small white dots hugging the scar like train tracks, immortalizing the points of entry and exit for the stitches that held the skin together.
I’ve taken to the habit of rubbing my scar absent-mindedly, often when I’m contemplating a problem or anxious about something. When I pinch the scarred skin between my fingers it feels like there is a thin and malleable wire just under the surface. The day I got that scar was the second-to-last time I ever pole vaulted, a week before my conference championship meet.
***
In some sports, there seems to be a pretty linear correlation between what you put in and what you get out; the harder you work, the better you do. You will get better at running if you run every day. You will get better at sinking baskets if you practice your free throw every day. You will get stronger if you bench press every day. Pole vaulting is not so kind, largely due to the variability in equipment, conditions, and athlete. You can vault on poles ranging from 10 feet to 20 feet long, intended for athletes weighing 80 to 220 pounds. You can vault on poles made of fiberglass or carbon-fiber material, running on runways made of asphalt or wood or rubber. The bar that must be cleared can be placed 18 to 32 inches away from the box where you insert your pole. The athlete can be strong but not fast, or coordinated but not strong, and so on. Sometimes the harder you try, the less your pole seems to be willing to cooperate.
I don’t recall how much I really knew about pole vaulting before I started. I’m sure I had some peripheral awareness of its existence, though my self-deprecation is eternalized in a local newspaper interview with the quote, “I didn’t even know pole vaulting was a sport!” My family still teases me relentlessly for this exaggerated admission. It is a somewhat unconventional passion, though, and I wish my genesis with the sport had an equally unconventional story – but it doesn’t. I had competed in gymnastics when I was younger and still had the speed, strength, and compact body of a gymnast when I joined my middle school track team. I took well to the short sprints, 100 and 200 meters, and would occasionally max out my anaerobic efforts with a 400 meter run. During an otherwise unmemorable meet in eighth grade, a teammate’s family friend approached me and asked whether I’d be interested in learning how to pole vault at a camp that summer. She was a retired track and field coach and seemed to think my short stature and small hands wouldn’t pose a limitation to my pole vaulting potential. I don’t remember the details of that conversation, but I do remember walking tentatively onto a firm rubber track a few months later to begin my first pole vault practice. And even though that practice yielded more missteps than miracles, I was enamored.
Vaulting became like an addiction to me. My body first felt awkward, my movements unnatural. I would second guess how many steps I needed to run before jumping and erratically twirl myself around the pole, appearing more as a pole dancer than pole vaulter. But with every repetition my efforts evolved, even becoming elegant. My time in high school became dominated by the sport. When people asked what event I did on the track team I was always proud by the expressions of surprise when I stated pole vault. I started researching professional vaulters, trying to emulate their workouts or diets or mental tactics. If you look at any piece of paper that passed through my hands during high school it would have drawings of at least one stick figure executing a perfect stick figure vault.
Pole vaulting was also something I shared with my dad. He was never a vaulter himself, but my journey into the sport turned out to be just as much his journey. By watching every meet and most practices he became better versed in the sport than many coaches I had met. He half-jokingly calls himself the best pole vault who’s never vaulted. Every Sunday, we would drive an hour and thirty minutes to a pole vaulting camp in a depressing warehouse. The mats there sagged with age and disintegrated with every landing, leaving behind plumes of yellowish dust that twisted and fanned out into the air. We didn’t come to this place for the facilities; we came for the very talented and very eccentric coach. Coach Johnson had a sloping walk and wore glasses that made his eyes look bigger than anatomically correct. He had a distinct way of speaking, inflecting words at random and often just trailing off into a shrug. But Coach Johnson and my dad would stand next to each other, arms crossed, and watch me vault for two hours. My dad would rarely give suggestions during these times – Coach was the expert and my dad knew he was learning just as much as I was. On the hour and a half drive home, we would talk about vaulting, or not. I loved pole vaulting for this. For the relationship I could foster with my dad and for the characters I met through the sport.
***
It was a week before our outdoor conference championship meet. We were practicing in our indoor facility because spring in Boston tends to resemble winter more often than not. After a somewhat lackluster season so far, I finally felt like I was getting my groove together; my body was finally responding to my mind and my training. My own name peered down at me from the Harvard All-Time Track and Field Records board, another permanent part of my pole vaulting identity. I felt a sense of encouragement muddied slightly by a twinge of taunting. I had broken both the indoor and outdoor all-time pole vaulting records during my sophomore year at Harvard, and found myself competing at the NCAA Regional Championships down in Florida that year. I missed qualifying for the final round of the National Championships in Oregon by a few inches. I would sometimes look up instinctively at the sign before a vault. If I’ve jumped that high before, I can certainly jump that high this time.
There are times in pole vaulting, fewer than I’d like, when your body and the pole are working in such tandem that the whole process feels effortless. You feel lifted off the ground by a force other than your own – no pushing or pulling, only moving and flowing through the air surrounding you. When you finally twist your body onto its stomach and you’re looking down at the bar that you are supposed to clear, your body curving gracefully, wrapping itself around the bar with a cushion of space to spare… It is a type of euphoria I have never equaled with any other activity or substance.
This is how I felt during that practice the week before championships. Many times, that feeling of weightlessness can be traced back to the way you plant the pole into the metal box. If your arms are bent low above your head, chest sunken and hollowed, feet flat and heavy, your vault is going to feel like you’re dragging yourself through mud, meanwhile ripping apart your lower back. I know this feeling because it is one I’ve experienced many times in my vaulting career. Conversely, if your arms are reaching up tall and powerfully like a good stretch, chest forward and maybe a bit puffed, feet directly under your center of mass and bounding, your vault is going to feel like a religious experience. I could’ve sworn I had felt bliss by way of the pole during that practice.
With beautiful vaults comes much force, however. And poles can only handle so much force – they are, after all, manmade and therefore fall victim to human error, whether by the manufacturer or the vaulter herself.
I was at the back of the runway, looking down at the large mats and metal box, a scene that was so familiar it felt as if I was closing my eyes. I lifted the pole up from the ground, holding it near its end with a comfortably loose grip. My hands no longer felt awkward with the contortions necessary to carry a pole correctly. The pole felt sturdy but light in my hands as they twisted around the grip tape. My pre-vault routine typically includes a lot of minor twisting adjustments, until my hands just know they’ve wiggled into the pole’s sweet spot. I trilled my right hand’s fingers along the base of the pole a few times before closing them, feeling locked and loaded. I stepped back with my right foot and looked slightly upward at the tip of the pole extended 13 feet ahead of me at about a 60o angle. And then I was off – bounding across the runway, the pole moving with my own foot strikes, slowly dropping with the assistance of our dear friend, gravity.
When I am upon the metal box, at the very moment before the tip of the pole makes contact with the sunken fixture, I have a flash of emotion. If that emotion is hesitant or scared or too intense, I know before leaving the ground that my vault’s going to shit. During this particular vault, that emotion was excited. I hit the back of the box with arms up, chest puffed, feet in place. I felt myself being lifted and then I heard a deafening crack! as my body rotated into total disorientation. Suddenly my legs were behind my head, my back crunched up awkwardly and my hands still desperately holding on to what was left of the pole. Flashes of ground, mat, ceiling, back wall, box passed too quickly for my brain to piece together what was happening. I heard gasps and loud expletives around me, from which I can only assume came from my teammates and coaches.
I landed onto the stiff mats in a contorted splayed position. My left shoulder blade and back were throbbing with pain. I stayed down on the mats, mentally scanning my body to make sure nothing felt broken. I was mostly concerned with my neck and back, but after a moment or two I felt confident that nothing was seriously injured. I pushed myself into a sitting position, teetering on the edge of the mat, and saw the carnage of my pole. It had broken into three pieces while I was in midair. The pieces now lay strewn around the mat and runway, looking dejected and harmless.
My teammates and coaches came swiftly to my side, one of them cradling my head to make sure it was still on straight, another touching my shoulder gingerly. That looks like hell, Allie. Are you alright?? I craned my neck over my left shoulder and saw a long, red welt in the shape of a pole fragment already forming. Apparently one of the broken pieces had snapped under the pressure and thwacked my shoulder menacingly. I’m fine, really. Hurts like a sonufabitch but let me just walk it off. My coach helped me to my feet and quickly noticed that the ground beneath me was splattered with blood. Allie, where are you bleeding from?? I stuck each leg out like I was striking a pose and pivoted, looking for cuts on my ankles or shins or knees. Nothing. I still felt no pain except the throbbing in my shoulder and soreness in my hands, so the blood came as a huge mystery to me.
Finally my coach pointed out that my palm was bleeding. He was right – sort of. I tenderly wiped the blood from my left palm and realized that my palm was not, in fact, bleeding. The source of the viscous fluid was from a gash in the webbing between my thumb and forefinger. I examined it, feeling surprisingly disengaged from the pain. Later I would learn that my body was teeming with so much adrenaline that I was experiencing temporary numbness. I spread my thumb and finger gently apart and inhaled sharply when I saw how deep the wound went. The skin parted ways like a fish’s mouth gasping for water in open air. I searched the innocent looking pole pieces for a culprit and found that one of the broken ends was splintered with telltale signs of rusty blood. Apparently while my hands were fighting to hold on to the pole, the way they had thousands of times before, a broken fragment had sliced me open. A teammate walked me to the athletic training facility across the courtyard where I was immediately numbed and given 8 stitches.
***
The last time I pole vaulted was at the track and field outdoor conference championships during my junior year, almost exactly one year ago, where all of the Ivy League schools compete against one another for the title. I’m normally a little anxious before a track meet, a beneficial instinct that increases the adrenaline coursing through my body and reminds me that these competitions are still exciting and worthwhile. When you lose the anxiety before a meet, you know you’re in trouble – you’ve lost sight of the stakes or your desire has waned. But this meet was more anxiety inducing than most, likely because of my heavily bandaged left hand.
My fingers were all free to wiggle as they pleased, but layers of gauze and gel and bandages smothered my palm and the 8 stitches that held together my thumb’s webbing. Gripping the pole felt unmanageable and miserable with this foreign and obtrusive material. It was the first time I had tried to pole vault after my accident and I found myself biting back tears as I clumsily handled the pole. Having vaulted for over 7 years, racking up tens of thousands of repetitions, this feeling was frustrating and unwelcome.
In pole vaulting you get three attempts to clear the bar at each height. Usually the bar goes up in six-inch increments, so if you’re confident in your ability or just feeling really good or have a nice tailwind behind you, then you’ll want to start the competition at a higher height. If you start too low, you’ll have to pole vault for hours and will be exhausted by the time the big heights come around – just when you need the energy. If you start too high, then you run the risk of hitting the bar down on all three attempts and suffering a No Height (NH), the absolute worst fate that a pole vaulter can suffer.
My warmups during that meet were atrocious. I felt out of control and lacked any confidence in my ability to handle the pole with my injured hand. I would run toward the box, the pole perched precariously against my bandages, and reflexively bail out immediately before reaching it, dropping my pole early and running off to the side of the large mats to avoid a collision. My coaches understood that I was in pain and reeling through some psychological turmoil, but I remained unforgiving toward myself. The next warmup, I would grit my teeth and speak harshly to myself: You WILL jump up on this one. You are not a coward or a quitter, so just jump, dammit! Inevitably, this type of mental beating only further tightened my knot of anxiety. After running past the mats again I resigned myself to a shitty warmup and took a seat, popping several more ibuprofen in an attempt to numb my hand.
The meet did not go well. In what would be my last collegiate track and field competition I suffered from that painful No Height.
***
The end of that championship meet marked the end of the school year and I made the decision to retire from college pole vaulting a couple months into the summer. I had been accepted into a high commitment internship for the next fall, but even before that I had begun to toy with the idea of leaving track and field. After seven years of pole vaulting it had become my primary identity. It was an identity that I had built up for myself and of which I was proud. Pole vaulting itself was never the problem, but I was disenchanted with my place on the track and field team. It dominated my thoughts, my attitude, and my time. Immediately upon coming to college, I was faced with the overwhelming wave of possibility and choice. I started to find my love spreading to other things, no longer concentrated in the part of my heart dedicated to track. I wanted newness and people and experiences. I wanted to see who I could be once out of the shadow of track athlete.
I became gripped with the feeling that track was standing more as a barrier to opportunity than a facilitator to opportunity. Harvard seemed to be knocking down my door with clubs and classes and internships to which I could only respond If only, if only, if only… I think it took the injury, something concrete and tangible, to help me justify my decision to retire. Without the scar it would’ve been too hard to give up on something that I still love so much. I was never nervous about my dad’s reaction – our relationship had continued to grow and evolve into something much greater than just pole vaulting – but it was going to be strange not to have our weekly pole vaulting is a giant metaphor for life chats. There would be no more home video analyses of my vault, no more inspirational letters after a bad meet, no more waving to my parents on the bleachers. I miss these things, but in that last year of track I had started to miss myself even more. I faced, and continue to face, the task of expressing myself without the pole vault. I now have the pleasure and responsibility to be intentional with my identity.
Only two days ago I received an email from a retired track and field coach that I had met four years ago at the conference championship meet during my freshmen year. The subject line of the email simply read: I am really heartbroken. The rest of the email goes like this:
Allie,
There were some of the Harvard vaulters at the meet at Princeton this past Saturday.
The word is that you are not vaulting this semester. See above: I am really heartbroken.
But I understand. Sometimes there are other priorities. I hope you are doing well.
I am doing well. Instead of wishing for more success, I am grateful for my failure and my injury. The small ridges of scar tissue remind me daily that I chose to seek more, and I chose not to rest on what had become a habitual identity.
My Pace Of Life 