Finally, A Win! 18' in Colorado.

Bear with me as I am a little delirious still from the 1,100 mile drive that delivered me home around 5am this morning.
What an awesome trip. How did I manage to win the Colorado State Fair Vault after driving for 2 days, and being the MC for the 2 competitions leading up to the elite group? I'll tell you how. I didn't try hard, because I couldn't. I was sitting under the tent announcing and my thoughts immediately went back to my time with Daniel Ryland, and one conversation specifically, warm ups. People take way too many warm up jumps. If your step is on, its on. Attempting to make a bunch of technical adjustments in the warm up used to be logical to me, but now I only see it as energy lost or wasted. All you need is a consistent step. Wasting all your energy trying to find a jump that feels right in the warm up, is pointless, and I see that now. Being guilty of this in the past myself, I knew that on Saturday I didn't have the ability to take such a warm up. So my plan was simple, do as little as possible to be confident I can perform. My warm up was approximately, 4 build ups, and 3 jumps from 18steps. That's it, no drills, pole runs, short run jumps, 10 minute jog, active warm up, etc. Once my step was close to on, I was done. Then I took 8 jumps in total in the competition. 2 at 16'6", 1 at 17', 1 at 17'6", 1 at 18', and 3 at 18'5". It felt like a great formula. Normally vaulters want to get all pumped up, and charged on adrenalin, I was literally falling asleep between jumps. I was beyond relaxed, I was down right sleepy. But my mind so empty, so clear. It's not that I didn't care, but I felt so calm it could almost be confused as indifference. It's too bad I was unable to clear a new PR at 5.61m as my jumping basically fell apart when the bar went up. But the competition was a great learning day for me, and I have lots of valuable information to fill my journal with, and am dying to jump again and use this knowledge.
This meet proved to me once more that I am on a journey of the mind and not the body. I am able to do physical feats now with a broken body, that proved difficult in the past for me even when I had a physical fitness level that the likes of super heroes would strive for.
For those of you who saw pictures or text about my foot, yes I did crash in the standards on my final vault of the evening and sprain my ankle. Its fat and hurts a bit, but its no big deal. I've done this before to a much larger degree, and I know this new injury will pass soon. Besides, time off my feet will not only help my ankle, but it will help my back as well. And when I do return to my regular training, it is all close to zero impact, the two injuries having similar rehab and fitness methods I'm not too concerned about it. It couldn't have come at a better time if it was going to happen at all. I actually feel like its someones way of telling me to chill out and not feed off the energy of the meet by taking too many jumps in the upcoming weeks and create more problems in my back. So for a guy with a fat ugly foot, I'm actually feeling completely centered and surprisingly enough, happy about it. I know that this is exactly how things are supposed to be at this moment in my story, and in the final pages I still foresee my happy ending.