Overachieving

Overachiever, Underachiever

Last week I was asked to give an impromptu speech, to 20 people at a Toasmaster meeting. The topic was to have something to do with school and overachieving or underachieving. That was an interesting exercise.

I decided to discuss high-jumping during 11th grade. For two years, I went to Evergreen high, which is in the mountains, just west of Denver. The altitude of 7,200 feet makes for some mighty thin air.

I was a reasonably good athlete, especially for a small school. Some people refer to this as “the big fish in the small pond” syndrome. There were only about 140 kids in our graduating class. Some of the boys had to work, others liked tennis or gymnastics. Still others were cowboys or in the school play or chasing girls. This means there were not many fellows available to go out for the track team.

Considering all of that, our coach still put together some fairly good teams; largely because he exploited that altitude issue. Whenever we went to the flat-lands of Denver, where the altitude was a mere 5280 ft., our guys could run all day, but when the city kids came to our home field, they huffed and puffed like the big bad wolf.

I was the third discus thrower, the third shot-putter and the first high jumper. We usually had track meets with one or two other small schools. I jumped 5’ 8” nearly every time and that always took first place in those meets. At the end of the year we had a district meet which was comprised of all of the schools in our district and I took first place there too, with a jump of…you guessed it, 5’ 8”. Other fellows from our school, also did very well.

The top few finishers at each event then went to State where the competition gets much tougher. There were about 10 of us from our small school who made that journey. Up to that point, one could easily label me an “overachiever”, but things were about to change.

There were so many good high-jumpers in our state, that they started the high jump at my highest level. Good ol' 5’ 8” may have been hot stuff where I came from, but it was small potatoes at the state meet.

The Western Roll (see video) is the customary way to jump over a high bar. The jumper tries to throw his feet up into the air and become parallel to the bar, then simply “roll” over it. During warm-ups, players and coaches from other schools noticed that my style was different. It resembled a diving technique in which I came off of one foot, not two.

They assumed everybody had to use the Western Roll, so they went to the officials and tried to have me disqualified, but my coach had heard that argument before. He whipped out the rule book and all it said was the jumper had to leave the ground off of one foot. There was no mention of the Western Roll.

Just then they raised the practice bar to five-foot nine-inches. It was my turn to take a run at it. Even though I could always jump 5’ 8”, I never did get any higher. It must have been a psychological block or something. This time was no different. I knocked the bar off its stand. When the other competitors realized I was never going to pose any threat to them, they stopped complaining.

When the meet started and the jumps counted, I was one of the first couple of guys eliminated. That was when I experienced serious “underachieving”.

It is ironic that a simple event like high-jumping can make one fellow both an overachiever and an underachiever, but it did.

Now I would have a hard time jumping over a donut, but I am still an overachiever when it comes to eating them.

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