Tucson Bound.

     This will be our final entry before leaving for our season openening meet in Tucson, Arizona. This is a meet that I (Pat) did last year and faired quite well, opening with an overall Decathlon personal best. This year I return with training partners, coaches, and family. Watchout Tuscon, HERE WE COME!!! The weather is showing to be suny days without a cloud in the sky.

Mark and I feel very prepared. Recently we have been getting James'ed quite a bit. This is the verb for having your coach (James Holder) try to make you experience as much physical discomfort as humanly possible. Here is a picture Chen snapped after a nice 400m workout #Jamesed. This is one of the three workouts we experienced lactic threshold.

Speaking of Chen. He has made quite the miraculous recovery and is in top form for this opener. He has taken care of himself and is now prepared to attack the FISU (World University Games) standard with me. For those of you who do not know, the standard we are looking to score is 7250pts to get us to Russia this July. More than reasonable for both of us. 

I will be leaving Canada's cold spring this Saturday and waiting for my better half to arrive on Monday to hammer out some warm weather workouts in the sun before the competition.  All that being said, stay tuned to the Ottawa Lions twitter account for results (@OttawaLionsTFC ), they will be more live and up to date with stories on the Ottawa combined eventers then the actual results. See you on the other side folks.

Signed, your two favourite Decathletes. 

So long indoor season

February has come to an end, and so has the indoor season.  With the last indoor meet for Pat this past weekend, this years indoor competitions have concluded.  This indoor season was exceptional for Mr. Arbour as to date he has set new pb's in pole vault (which he pb'd again in this weekend with a 4.51m clearance), shot put, tied his high jump pb and had a big pb in the hurdles and overall pent personal best!  He even had a second best effort in the long jump.  Not a bad indoor start I must say.  Big shout out to our PV coach Jeff who after this indoor season had 26 pb's from his athletes.  Insane!

Nice little picture of Pat doing what he says was "dialling in his warm-up"

While it was quite a short lived season for myself due to injury (only competing once, and barely at that), I can finally say that I'm virtually back to 100% training!  After months of waiting, I can now enjoy most workouts pain free.  Now that indoors is over and I'm finally healthy and Patrick is riding a pb train, what could make things better?  Knowing that we have only one month until our decathlon opener in Tucson!

We are both incredibly excited for Tucson this year because not only will it hopefully be a great competition with great competitors, but it will most likely be warm and sunny.  None of this cold, white stuff anymore.  This is also our one chance to get the FISU (world university games) standard, that both of us are hunting for. This would give us the opportunity to go to Russia in July and compete in the biggest international meet either of us would have been too.  It is considered the 2nd largest multi-sport games after the Olympics!

So until Tucson we'll be putting in the hours at the track to make sure we give ourselves the best possible chance to get on that team.  Just to keep things visual, here's a little compilation of some of our recent training indoors.  Lookout for our amazing videography.  We even dubbed in some slow mo and music...wild!  A little shaky on the robot running style and not too sure about the transitioning but we'll get it eventually ha ha.