Lacy Janson Update

[rainbowgirl28]

At the top of the article and in the caption of the picture on their website, they keep saying she has not vaulted since her accident, but within the article it says she is vaulting from a short run, which sounds pretty consistent with what someone who is training to compete at the Olympic Trials would be doing...

http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs. ... 30833/1006

Fighting monsters

By CHRIS ANDERSON

chris.anderson@heraldtribune.com

TALLAHASSEE - Dinosaurs frightened her when she was small.

What if they got into the house and found out where she slept? E.T. used to scare her, too. Whatever that thing was, it sure looked creepy, and what if it came to get her with the dinosaurs?

When it was time for bed, she would flip off the light, hold her breath, and then dash up the stairs, afraid of what lurked in the darkness.

And if she were lucky, she would be tucked safely under the covers before she woke up the monsters living in her closet.

It's funny, but the things that used to scare Lacy Janson as a 7-year-old existed only in her imagination.

Her cover-your-eyes fall while pole vaulting last summer must be viewed in the same context.

To reach the 2004 Olympic Games, she must first open the closet door to see what's really inside.

"If she puts it to bed, and there are plenty of reasons to justify why it happened, then it won't affect her," said John Raleigh, Janson's former coach at Cardinal Mooney.

"But if it's something that's going to bother her forever, it could limit how high she can go."

The fall

A pole-vaulter climbs closer to the clouds than any other athlete does.

A pole-vaulter always assumes he or she will land on something as soft as the clouds, too.

Lacy Janson landed on concrete. She missed the mat.

"It was bad," Janson said. "It was the worst pain I've ever felt."

"It was awful," said Laurie Janson, Lacy's mother. "The world stood still."

The fall took place in June at the 2003 USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Stanford, Calif.

The height was easily negotiable, around 13 feet, or "something I could clear in my sleep," she said.

Her trip down the runway was all right, slower than normal, but all right. There was little penetration, however, and when she reached bar-level she knew it would turn disastrous, everyone knew.

"She just stalled right at the top," Laurie Janson said. "You never just stop."

She has always had keen body-awareness from gymnastics as a child, but when she reached the top she felt helpless.

She was too tired to react. Her mind knew how to recover. Her body wouldn't allow her to.

According to Raleigh, from the time a pole-vaulter's feet leave the ground until the bar is cleared, the body will enact 32 different motions.

It all happens in less than 8/10ths of a second.

"If you have one thing out of whack …" Raleigh said.

The fall could have been much worse, though. She was lucky, and landed mainly on her back. Her head caught part of the mat, saving her from serious injury, perhaps even death.

A friend of hers had a similar fall. His head didn't catch the mat.

He died.

"I just layed there," she said. "I couldn't move. I was crying and I couldn't breathe. I was having the worst day of my life it seemed."

"I said over and over, 'Please get up. Just get up,'" Laurie Janson said.

She couldn't. The paramedics came. She was placed in a neck brace, and then moved onto a stretcher. The biggest track and field meet in the country stopped for 30 minutes.

As she lay on a stretcher, her father asked if she wanted to vault again. She didn't hesitate. Yes, she did want to vault again.

She was taken to a local hospital and given morphine. X-rays followed, and when they didn't reveal a fracture, she was allowed to leave after five hours.

"I look back now and I had to have had some sort of guardian angel because I fell from 13 feet on my back on concrete and I didn't break anything," Janson said. "No fractures, nothing."

A visit with the monster

How do you do it? How do you vault again? Why do you vault again? Is it because of the Olympics? Are you too close to touching its rings to pull back your hand?

Is it to prove the fall didn't rattle you, couldn't rattle you? Or is it because you believe love conquers everything, most of all fear?

"I love it so much," Janson said. "It's what I'm good at. I wouldn't give it up for anything.

"I can't quit because I don't want to quit. If the Olympics weren't there I would still want to do it."

Still, the Cardinal Mooney grad and Florida State junior has not fully vaulted since her fall five months ago.

It's not because she's afraid to fall again, she insists. It's because she wants to fly even higher, and being grounded for a while could help her do just that.

Janson has a legitimate shot at making the U.S. Olympic team, and is tapering her training to avoid being tired for the Olympic Trials in June.

Had she not fallen, the same plan would have been implemented, she said.

To stay fresh for the Trials, she might be red-shirted for the upcoming indoor season at FSU, and could also be red-shirted for the outdoor season.

Janson is the reigning NCAA indoor champion with a vault of 14 feet, 7.25 inches.

She expects to know her collegiate status sometime around the holidays.

A few weeks ago she resumed her training by taking short approaches with a small pole on FSU's track.

She hasn't been vaulting over a bar, but she's been planting the pole and landing on a mat. Her approaches on the runway have been from 60-80 feet. Normally they would be from 106 feet.

Janson insists the reason she's not afraid to return is she can justify why her fall occurred.

This is the most important part of her story, making friends with the monster, and understanding why it can breathe fire.

Signs of trouble

A week before her fall, Janson was participating in the NCAA nationals, and on her third run-through she heard a pop in her ankle.

"It was excruciating pain when I ran," she said.

Her ankle was heavily taped for the USA Championships. It limited her speed down the runway that day.

On the night before the USA Championships, she went out to eat at a pasta place, which didn't help either.

"I had this beefish, pasta-y, cream-saucey thing," she said. "It makes me sick every time I talk about it. It was just gross."

She became nauseated and a fever set in. Her mom came to her hotel at 1 a.m. It was 2:30 before she fell asleep.

"I told her at 2 in the morning, 'You need to start thinking about not doing this. It's not smart,'" Laurie Janson said.

She was still sick the next morning when she went to the meet.

"I was so exhausted," Janson said. "I couldn't move."

In their hotel room that morning, Laurie Janson turned to her husband and said, "This isn't right. I'll be glad when this is over."

"It was a sinking feel I had that morning," Laurie Janson said.

At the meet, Lacy Janson did three run-throughs. Normally she does seven.

"I did a couple of run-throughs and it was the hardest thing I've ever done," Janson said. "I had no energy.

"I had no business being out there. I know that now. It just wasn't a smart move on my part."

There was also internal pressure for Janson to vault that day. It was the biggest outdoor meet of the year, and with a solid vault she had a serious shot at going to the World Championships in Paris.

"I was in a tough position," Janson said. "It was USAs and I'd worked all season for that. Obviously, I wanted to jump with all the big dogs."

Recovery time

Laurie Janson sat in the front seat of the ambulance. On the way to the hospital, she could hear her daughter crying from the back.

Laurie Janson was there when Lacy arrived at the Tallahassee airport from California, too. She pushed her daughter through the terminal in a wheelchair.

There was still tremendous pain. It was hard to get in bed, and in cars. It was tough to put on pants, and navigate stairs.

For a while, she swallowed painkillers such as Vicodin and Vioxx. She took most of the summer to recover.

Though Lacy insisted she would vault again, she did voice concerns to her mother during those months.

"I think she had plenty of concerns about it," Laurie Janson said.

And if Lacy's concerns have faded, her mother still has them, even if she is excited about the possibility of her daughter reaching the Olympics in Greece.

"I just want to tell people she qualified for the (Olympic) Trials," Laurie Janson said. "I'm kind of just concentrating on being proud of that.

"She's going to be in the Trials, for heaven's sake."

Janson's parents usually attend every meet, but Laurie knows the next meet will be tough. It will be her daughter's first since the fall.

"It will be nerve-wracking sitting in the stands and watching," Laurie Janson said. "It always has been, but it will be extra tense now. Now I know what can happen."

A friendship ended

Lacy Janson was about to become a sophomore at Florida State. Kevin Dare was about to become a sophomore at Penn State.

They were pole-vaulters, which meant they were friends.

They spent time together in the summer of 2002 at a meet in England, and also at the Pan Am Junior Championships in Argentina that October.

They ate together, saw the sights together, "and just hung out the whole trip," Janson said.

A few months later, in late February, a friend of Janson's was watching the news and suddenly ran into Janson's room at FSU. A pole-vaulter from Penn State had just died.

"I said, 'Please don't let it be Kevin,'" Janson said.

On Feb. 23, during the Big Ten Indoor Track and Field Championships in Minneapolis, Kevin Dare missed the mat during a vault.

He died of severe head and neck injuries.

"He died doing basically the same thing I did," Janson said. "He just landed a little farther out and hit his head on the box.

"That scared me. The thought of doing the same thing he did scared me a lot."

Also that month, a high school pole-vaulter in Clewiston died during a similar accident.

According to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research, there were 15 fatal pole-vaulting injuries from 1983-2000 in the nation.

By contrast, there were 74 deaths in football during the same period.

"It hit really close," Janson said of Dare's death. "It was hard to get over."

Getting back on the horse

Lacy Janson liked to swim in the sink holes in Tallahassee. They are deep pits filled with water.

One day, she did a front-flip and landed hard on her stomach.

Undeterred, she moved to a tree-swing and attempted another flip, which resulted in an even harder landing.

"Sometimes I don't know when to quit," she said.

When she was young, she fell out of trees and off of swings and she was always going to the school nurse, it seemed. She wouldn't mind jumping out of a plane someday.

And she insisted she is not concerned about her first vault in a meet, either.

"Getting back on that horse is not going to be that hard," Janson said. "I know how to vault and it will not happen again."

"I'm not scared," Janson said. "I'm not scared because I don't want to be scared."

What's there to be scared of anyway? Monsters have lived in her closet before.

[achtungpv]

I've seen her vault 2 or 3 times in the past two years and she was severely overgripping, taking off 3-4 feet under, landing very shallow, and drifting towards the right standard. Probably all of these problems followed her from HS, but all of them should have been addressed by her coach before an accident happened.

[VTechVaulter]

Its unbelievable how important a role your mind plays in this sport. Lets hope she can stay strong. Look forward to seein her at indoors