Second Day on The Ground - A Dad's Diary by Clayton Frech - August 23rd, 2021
This blog post originated from Clayton’s Frech’s personal Facebook page. He is chronicling his journey as a dad with his son that is headed to Tokyo.
You would think that since all we have to do is focus on sports... that there would be a lot of spare time. But in reality, you really don’t have much time. When you add up the meals, workouts, transportation, recovery, media and sponsor obligations, equipment tuning, official meetings, etc., you just run out of hours in the day. We keep finding ourselves scrambling to appointments and having to reschedule things.
One of the model rooms of the Tokyo dorms.
HPC – What an AMAZING facility
LaTi and I grabbed an early taxi to the official US Training site, the HPC (High Performance Center). It’s a way outside of town, but it’s amazing!! What a beautiful track! The facility is enormous and has baseball and probably tons of other sports. Different than the general practice track from yesterday where all teams are able to train, this was just for US athletes. It had a totally different, more fun, casual, vibe. It was really amazing… I didn’t want to leave…
We arrived just before the team bus did, so maybe around 8:15am or so. This will be our only morning workout and we shifted for an NBC interview. They filmed Ezra’s long jump session and the interaction between him and Coach Mack. And then did a solo interview with him in a really cool turfed warm-up area on the upper deck of the stadium. He seemed to be jumping pretty well but they didn’t measure his jumps and just worked on form.
We got back and went straight to see Heinrich Popow, the grandfather / innovator / legend behind above knee sprinting and long-jumping. He works for Ottobock and is a really wonderful guy, always thinking about the athletes and how he can support them to be the best athletes possible. We discussed, in the future, setting up his legs differently for each event (Long Jump, High Jump, and 100M) for the Paris 2024 run-up, so look for Ezra to have three track legs at some point next year!
The Future is Bright
We also started a longer term conversation about how can we improve the technology for high jump. There are very few above knee amputees who use a running blade. Most take the leg off and hop on one leg to the bar. Nobody is able to bring speed, they just muscle over it. This limits their upward potential.
Ezra resting on the bench after track practice.
If we can figure out how to get Ezra flying through the curve, he can jump significantly higher than he is already. The Paralympics are a convening that brings the world’s expertise around adaptive and Paralympic sports together, in one place. Information, surprisingly or not, is very fragmented in the movement.
I have to say that I know a lot executives in the prosthetic industry and information is very hard for me to find to help optimize Ezra’s journey. The bottom line is, I believe Ezra is a once in a generation athlete with his focus, dedication, tremendous ability, and clutch performance skills. And by dialing in the technology over the next few years, you will not want to miss Paris 2024, I promise…
Ezra had a gym workout in the afternoon that I joined him for. Then I relaxed in the recreation room and worked for a couple of hours, went shopping in the store in the plaza, and went back to meet Ezra for dinner.
I have to say, being able to see Ezra frequently in the village, have meals with him and his teammates, means so much to me. Most likely, I’ll never have such a wonderful opportunity again. Access to athletes and the Village is pretty minimal – coaches and staff. I am appreciating this year for the unicorn of a year that it is. In the future, I might be able to visit him in the village briefly. And watch him compete from the stands… but nothing like this. Feeling SUPER grateful.
After dinner I headed back to the hotel. When I arrived, I went out and got a little fresh air with Coach LaTi in front of our hotel, and then crashed for the night!