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– It is difficult to say what is scary about that jump. Maybe there will be a similar blackout in the head. Don’t really know what to do, a three-time value jumper Elina Lampela describes the jump scare in Sportliv.
He felt anxiety even before training. It was scary to go to training, when you didn’t know what would happen again – and if he could jump at all.
It was difficult to get the pole into the hole and one jump after another ended in a through run. He continued to compete, but his performance stopped.
Perhaps the fear of jumping started when Lampela tried to jump with a longer pole eight years ago and came down on the track instead of a mattress.
– Nothing dangerous happened and all places were intact. But maybe that left a little fear in the back of my head. That, in principle, it can go badly.
This was followed by four difficult years. Elina Lampela was 17 years old when the problems started.
Now Lampela, 25, is better than ever.
Watch Sportliv’s mini-documentary about what it’s like to live with fear of jumping and how Elina Lampela finally got over it:
“It does look cool”
Elina Lampela likes fast-paced situations and challenging herself. When he got to try pole vaulting in Oulu’s Pyrinnö athletics group, the sport immediately felt like his.
It suited his personality.
– Pole vaulting is a bit of an extreme sport. It requires acrobatics and it looks cool, says Lampela.
Lampela did his first competitive jumps at the age of 11 in 2010. Just three years later, he participated in the European Youth Olympic Festival in Holland, where he jumped 402 and set a Finnish record for 15-year-olds.
In the following years, Lampela also improved the Finnish records for 17- and 19-year-olds, and in 2015 he was together Wilma Murron with at the top of the world statistics in his age group.
That same year, he jumped 432, which ended up being his personal best for five years.
Pole vaulting anatomy – and what can go wrong
Pole vaulting is not like other athletics. Many things have to go right for the jump to happen at all. Not to mention a successful jump.
In the first stage, it is important to get to the pit as hard as possible.
The faster you get to the effort phase, the more energy you can transfer to your body. And the more energy, the bigger wings and higher grips you can use.
After the takeoff, there is a distance phase, when the hands are pushed against the pole while the hips and legs are swung above the head.
Then we turn towards the bar, which is crossed stomach first. On the bar, you should get into the so-called cup position, so that the hips go as high as possible.
– The performance must be fully automated. The best situation is when you don’t have a lot of thoughts in your head. Everything happens so fast that you don’t have time to think. If you think about something, that stage of jumping has already passed.
In mental imagery exercises, you can go through the jumping technique accurately, but not in the actual jump. In practice, many things can go wrong.
– If you notice that the step marks don’t match, you might be firing too hard. Then comes the effort too low. Then it’s difficult to correct the jump anymore, and it might happen that you end up on the track.
The scariest and most critical phase of the jump is taking off.
According to Lampela, starting from the ground can destroy the entire jump. But if it succeeds, the final jump usually goes well too.
– Then you can even ventilate during the air flight. After a failed takeoff, you’re just waiting to get down on the mattress to start analyzing what went wrong.
The vicious cycle of breakthroughs
After the unsuccessful show jumping in the summer of 2015, the run-throughs started to increase. At that time, Lampela didn’t pay much attention to it yet, because all pole vaulters have run-throughs from time to time.
The following year, he started having trouble getting the club into the hole. There were more and more throughs, and he wasn’t able to use as big wings and high holds as before. At the same time, the fear grew.
– Doing things then can’t be relaxed and liberated, but it was the same kind of squeezing, which, of course, doesn’t lead to anything.
The situation worsened and eventually Elina Lampela could no longer jump.
– It was scary to go to training, when there was an uncertain feeling that oh no, what will come of this training. When I jumped, I felt anxiety. It’s really difficult even to understand what’s in it.
Lampela had disturbing thoughts in her head: what if the step marker gets too close and I fall down onto the track? Or what if the effort comes too far and I can’t reach the mattresses?
– Maybe there was some kind of fear that something bad would happen. That he will be hurt somehow, Lampela thinks.
– It was really hard to think that I would ever be able to jump again.
Since run-throughs are pretty common anyway, it took a while before she was ready to admit she had a problem.
Way back
Elina Lampela started doing jumps on the sand. Instead of having to hit the metal pit, the soap could hit anywhere in the sand pit.
– It made jumping more relaxed and was an easy way to get a lot of ground starts.
– The negative cycle was that there were a lot of run-throughs and I had to go home crying from almost every jumping practice. Now it was translated into the fact that even if you jumped with small wings, they were still successful workouts.
Lampela understood that there is no other way out of the situation than to move forward little by little. At the same time, imagery training became an important tool for defeating the fear of jumping.
In mental imagery training, the purpose is to go through the jump as accurately as possible and from your own perspective. Not like watching the performance from the sidelines.
Later, Lampela has experienced mental image training as a good method also when she wants to change something in her jumping technique. Then you can visualize in your mind what kind of jumps you would like to do.
In February 2020, Elina Lampela finally managed to improve her almost exactly five-year-old record by three cents. During the summer, the record increased another fifteen centimeters to 450.
The Olympic dream helped me cope
Although Elina Lampela’s fear of jumping lasted a long time, she never seriously considered quitting.
He had dreamed of the Olympics since he was a child, and that dream drove him to continue his daily work. And the knowledge that 432 is not his maximum. He didn’t want it to go on the record.
– At some point I thought that when I jump over it, then I can stop. But at that point, of course, I didn’t want to stop anymore, says Lampela three years later.
When Lampela exceeded 450 in the summer of 2020 and the Tokyo Olympics had been postponed a year due to the corona pandemic, he slowly began to wonder if he might have a chance to participate.
His previous prestigious competitions were the 2015 European under-20 competitions.
– It was quite a big jump to the Olympics. Yes, I was put straight in the deep end at that point, Lampela recalls.
– Suddenly I found myself in the Olympic village, surrounded by top athletes that I had only seen on TV before, and I thought: “Help, what am I doing here?”
Lampela went without a result in his Olympic debut, but has since competed in both the EC and World Championships last summer and in the EC indoor competitions last winter.
460 and the World Championships
This year, Lampela and his coach Rauli Pudas have focused on developing speed and improving takeoff. When these can be made to work together, there will be additional cents required for records.
In June, Lampela improved his record to 456 and the summer goal is to exceed at least 460.
The main goal of the season is the World Championships in Budapest in August. Lampela is going there as a slightly more experienced athlete who has gone through the jumping rope.
– Being a top athlete is sometimes really hard. Especially when you don’t walk and it’s really tight in training, and when the results from the games don’t come as you’d like. It’s really tough.
– But then the good days, good competitions, good training. Yes, then you always realize that it’s a joke, this is just the best.