As a collegiate athlete at the Division III level, the most common question I hear is “Pole vault? What even is that?” Once asked by my parents, now it comes from professors and TAs when I miss class for a meet. The questions are usually followed by a bewildered expression and a series of awkward attempts at imitating high jump.

Sometimes, my interviewer will almost let me talk about what really matters in the sport. “Isn’t it scary? Aren’t you afraid?” And I always answer, “Yes!” which usually seems to impress my listener before they wish me good luck on my competition and then start on about how I should make up the lecture. Of course, these people aren’t really reporters, and nobody is really interviewing me. But as I walk away, my mind lingers on what I never get to say.

Yes, pole vault is scary, and I am often afraid. If I start down the runway while I am still weighted with fear or expectations, I’ll bail at the last moment and never leave the ground. But if I’m willing to let go of those things, the rest simply follows, natural and familiar as breath.

In that way, pole vault is deceiving to those who have never done it—what one might think is the most difficult and dangerous part is not that complicated for a reasonably experienced and mentally collected vaulter. In my time in the sport, all the defining moments of vaulting have lived in the hesitating silence before I pick up the pole. And while “mental toughness” floats around as a vague suggestion for anyone’s self-improvement, it is the pole vaulter’s entire heroic struggle, and one that she must undertake alone.

Of course, no heroine can struggle without an origin story. Mine begins in glimmering Lake Oswego, spring 2019.

 

Opening Height

In my freshman year of high school, I sat on the football stands after soccer practice and watched the vaulters on the track team bravely bend a seemingly unbendable stick, twist their bodies upside down, and launch themselves vertically into the air. What the hell? I was intrigued. The reckless arc of the pole, the paradox of swinging backwards while trying to move forwards, the utter volatility of it all… My fascination pulled me to the sport like gravity. I couldn’t imagine the physics of it all, but I knew that I wanted to know how those vaulters felt, performing like second nature what few others could even understand.

The next day, I introduced myself to the coach, a tall man who wore sunglasses even under the Oregon clouds. I remember seeing my small reflection staring back at me in Tim’s lenses when we first spoke. That was the first time in my life that I alone decided to take a chance on myself and chase a strange new dream that would quickly become my identity.

My first high school season naturally bled into a year-round presence at the local vault club, a dusty warehouse on the side of town where cops wouldn’t give tickets to Chevys. The coach, Rick, had decorated the walls with “Obama Didn’t Build This!” stickers and the flags of every American military branch—even the Space Force. In the winter, the place was cold enough to crack open callouses. In the summers, it was fifteen degrees hotter than outdoors and humid as an armpit. Everything inside, from rusty dumbbells to pristine carbon-fiber poles[1], was covered in an everlasting layer of black grime. I loved it there.

For a long while, Rick taught me technique and the pieces that we worked for quickly fell into place. I started to seriously love what I could do. I loved the feeling of leaping into the air, the feeling of straining the pole like an archer’s bow. I levitated, and then I launched myself up, an arrow. I loved hearing exclamations from the pole vault dads as I reached the apex of my vault and knowing that Rick was leaning over and explaining how I am strong as hell to their nodding baseball caps. And I loved the fall from flight, tendrils of my hair floating about me, the rush of pride showing in my cheeks. I felt like I could do anything, an indestructible madwoman.

 

The First Miss

            My sophomore and junior years were spent like this, learning technique with endless attention and approval from Rick, Tim, and other influential coaches. But while pole vault gave me life, strength, and independence, it could also be frustrating. For one, there were and always will be endless aspects of my form to be improved, yet the technique is so complex that it’s impossible to keep everything in mind during each vault.  Doubling down and trying to perfect every move often broke more than it fixed. I’ve always joked that the vault is like whack-a-mole—once one part is improved, another problem pops up, and then another. And since every competition ends in three missed attempts to clear an ever higher bar, every vaulter always ends on a failure.

This is where the “mental toughness” comes in. You must let the need for absolute control and perfection go, or else you will not fly—you will fall. But thinking this way was never as natural to me as the motions of the vault. I began to suffer from my mindset, the beginning of a long stretch of learning the hard way.

In the fall of my senior year of high school, I could almost taste the blooming realization of my potential. I greatly improved my form that summer, but I wasn’t jumping higher yet, so to me, I wasn’t getting better at the vault. What started as hypercritical evaluation of every jump’s flaws quickly spiraled into a thick doubt that caught me before I had even attempted the jump. It felt like I had to be perfect every time. You aren’t going to be able to do it. It’s not going to be good enough.

Back in those days, I would come to practice hopeful, but as soon as I hit the runway, a choking fear would rise through my body. The poles I always used[2], once my most reliable friends, felt like shifty strangers in my hands. As I ran down the runway, it no longer felt like I was approaching a thrilling task. Instead, I felt a buildup of dread and futility that made me cower at takeoff instead of following through with the jump. So, of course, my jumps didn’t feel as effortless and powerful as they used to, and even though I could still clear the same heights as always, I felt like I wasn’t getting any better. I wrote in my journal:

I miss pole vault because it gave me an identity that I was unashamedly proud of, which helped me be prouder of myself. It is so beautiful, to hold the power of pole vault, because the power of pole vault is belief. But belief and trust feel too flimsy and unreliable right now. Anyone can say they can do it, and anyone can actually believe that for themselves. What’s the difference between them and the ones who show it?

For the rest of my senior year, I struggled immensely to overcome my feelings of self-doubt. Where I once flew, I was now increasingly, inexplicably grounded. And worst of all, I was somehow doing it to myself against my own will, as everything wrong was in my head. I wanted desperately for someone else to take care of it for me, for someone to say a few magic words that would fix everything. I talked to a sports psychologist. My mother consoled me when I sobbed at night over my lost potential. But nothing helped.

My one remaining shred of hope lay in my approaching time at MIT, as I had begrudgingly committed to the track team there. My future coach promised me that he understood my plight, and that it was fixable. I felt optimistic to begin. But to my dismay, it became clear that external changes like starting college and moving to a new place would not automatically refresh my mindset. I wanted to find the quickest hacks back to functionality. Instead, Coach Hall would stand awkwardly nearby and ask about my feelings, attempting to fix things from the head down.

I had counted on Coach Hall to be my cure, but all he did was infuriate me. At MIT, I couldn’t even do simple drills. It wasn’t that I believed that any attempt I made wouldn’t be good enough. Now, I felt like if it wasn’t a perfect jump, I would get hurt. You won’t be able to do it had somehow turned into You can’t do it. I ran through[3] over and over. It felt like I had completely forgotten everything I knew about pole vault, like my memory had been wiped by my past year of low confidence and mean thoughts.

I didn’t recognize myself at all in the reflection of how I was jumping. I was supposed to be the top recruit, but here I was, a defective specimen with an attitude problem, even worse off than when I committed. The highest bar I cleared was two feet under my personal record (PR), a bar that I once would’ve considered insulting to even open a competition with.

I recalled how much pride I had once taken in my form, in my big fearless takeoff, whereas nowadays I bailed more than I jumped. When I stood at the back of the runway, tasked with getting over my stupid fear of a pole that I outgrew when I was fifteen, the lights around me seemed to dim. I shouldn’t be here right now. I should not be struggling so much with such a stupid, small pole at this stupid, small meet. Why do I even put myself through this?

That year, my ego and pride were hurt so much that I thought about quitting almost every day. But something in me refused to let this be my end—after each dark flirtation with giving up, something deeper than my wounds tugged at my mind. After all the triumph that pole vault had once made me feel, how could I walk away in such defeat? Even though the past two years had estranged me from my identity in pole vault, I knew that quitting before putting up my best fight would be an even bigger abandonment, a usurpation of my integrity as a person.

 

The Second Attempt

I went home that summer bearing a great sense of loss and defeat, but I also felt the beginnings of a new hope. After a small break from pole vault in the forgiving lull of June, I returned to Rick’s grimy club in Oregon. In the place where I had once discovered my passion, I now had a mission to limp through the ruins of my relationship with pole vault and find something worth saving. But I continued to struggle in the same way that I had been doing for years—doubting myself, running through, and getting angry about it. One day, Rick took me aside.

“At some point, you’re gonna have to start wanting this bad enough to change.”

I remember recoiling like he just told me the sky wasn’t blue. Of course I wanted it! I wanted to be good at pole vault so badly that I’d put myself through hell for the past two years. I was reeling, but he was adamant that at some point, I was going to have to find a way to face myself and make a change.

That month, I thought about Rick’s statement a lot. Honestly, I was offended. He’d seen me struggle in high school and had surely followed my abysmal results in this year’s collegiate meets. How could he disrespect that pain by acting as if I had suffered because I didn’t want to be better? The salt stung, but it made me deeply reflect on what someone who truly “wanted it” might do in my shoes. I started to understand what Rick meant.

I realized that it looked like I didn’t want to change because I was so fixated on stumbling upon a miraculous cure. In my misery and self-doubt, I had failed to focus on any constructive solution. I was relentlessly throwing myself against impenetrable walls that I had built up in my mind—don’t do this, don’t do that, just be good, just be perfect—which was cruel rather than tough. This new perspective changed how I approached my struggles with pole vault. Which in turn, changed everything. I decided to finally yield to a piece of advice that I had once dismissed as utterly useless—to just have fun. Because if I couldn’t learn to enjoy my sport again, then it wasn’t worth my time, my tears, or my dignity.

At first, having fun was difficult for me. I had a lot of mental and technical bad habits to face. Before then, I had refused to look inwards, take responsibility, and admit that what I was going through might require me to make significant changes to myself, not just wish on a star. I took it slow that summer, and with Rick’s help, I began to believe that although changing myself was scary, it meant that I had more control over my situation than I thought. I returned to college athletics with a new outlook, a refreshingly unwavering resolve to simply make the best of whatever I could accomplish each day, even if I didn’t jump high.

Although it sounds obvious, I finally started to internalize that I really could choose how I felt each time I vaulted. I didn’t have to be devastated if I accepted wherever I happened to be and appreciated whatever I was able to accomplish on a given day. I didn’t have to worry about living up to anything if my only standard was to give myself a shot and see what happened. This shift in attitude was so empowering after two years of feeling like I was broken and waiting to be fixed. There would be no magic words from a coach or a therapist. I had to be the one to want to help myself enough to make a change. With this new mentality, I was able to gradually relearn to trust my vaulter instincts and accept that although pole vault would always be a little scary for me, I knew how to do it well.

Now, in my sophomore year at MIT, I look back on this time in my life and hardly recognize the person I was before I had the courage to face my bad habits. I also can’t believe that I once thought that success required harsh impatience. I now think it is odd how difficult it was for me to start having compassion for myself. After I learned to stop running from failure long enough to cultivate success, I don’t run through much at all anymore. In my second seasons at MIT, I jumped PRs for the first time in two years, some of which qualified me for Indoor Nationals. After winning an All-American award, I continued to attempt the highest bars I’d ever faced throughout outdoor season. After clearing 3.90m[4], my PR to this day, I reflected in my journal about how far I’d come.

April 20^th, 2024: Hi, it’s me. I jump 3.90 now. Last weekend, I took my first ever attempts at 13 feet, on my biggest pole that I got in my junior year of high school that I thought I might never use. And all I could say to myself on the runway was, “I’m so proud of you.”  And it’s true. I can’t believe I’m here now. I can’t even recall how many times in the past I’ve wished and hoped for 12 feet, and this year I went from jumping lower than that to clearing 12’6 without much ado. And the whole way to 3.90, I knew that with the improvements I’ve made in mindset this year, I had more.

Perhaps best of all, even after all the PRs and victories, I feel as though I have finally found my way back to appreciating that although each competition will end with failure, and the outcome of each attempt can’t truly be controlled, vaulters always have three chances to get it right. So even though I might botch the first time I face a new bar, there will be two more chances, and what a privilege that I get to try again! That there is a chance to correct my mistakes, to approach in a better way, to forgive the failure and let it go and move on to the next jump. And the second attempt is sanguine—you are wiser after the first, but not yet facing elimination. The second attempt, they say, is often the most beautiful one.

 

Notes:

[1] Vaulting poles are lightweight, hollow tubes of carbon fiber. They vary in thickness and weight depending on their length, stiffness, and brand. I use Essx poles, which are superior.

[2] A seasoned vaulter will use many poles of different stiffnesses and lengths in a practice or competition as they warm up and input more energy into the vault.

[3] “Running through” is a very common ailment in pole vault. It is when a vaulter does not put the pole down at the end of their run; they bail at the last minute and run onto the pit instead of jumping up. Vaulters do this when it doesn’t feel safe to take off, or if they generally lack confidence.

[4] 12’9.5”

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