ASU Olympians

He stares motionless, 10 steps in front of a thin yellow bar elevated approximately seven feet in the air.  He sees a hologram of himself, he says, running, jumping, clearing the bar with perfect accuracy. 

Bryan McBride, former ASU track and field star and current high-jump Olympic prospect, does this every time he prepares to contort his body into a reverse half moon and hurdle his 6-foot-3 stature over a one-and-a-half-inch wide crossbar.

“The interesting thing is once you figure it out it's like anything else,” McBride said. “It's like a light goes on in your head and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s what you're supposed to do.'”

It took McBride his entire high school career to get that light bulb to flicker. When he was first introduced to the sport his sophomore year, it was a game of get-over-the-bar-any-way-you-physically-can.

However, that didn’t satisfy the young athlete. He began watching videos and started to make it technical. He broke the jump into smaller parts, separating the run, the actual jump and the form so that when he fit it back together, every piece was at its highest level. By his senior year, he had categorized the types of jumpers into two: power jumpers and speed jumpers.

He turned his straight-on approach to the bar into a J-approach, the type all professionals run.

“Power jumpers can more or less sacrifice some technique because they are so powerful in their legs that they can kind of get up to the bar easier and they don't have to be as focused,” McBride said. “And they can afford to make little mistakes here and there when it comes to their technique.”

McBride quickly found out his long legs allowed him to be a speed jumper, something he uses along with technique to his advantage.

“In terms of what I lack for power, I make sure I make up for in technique,” he said.

From there he learned the positioning: letting the shoulders go first, then bending the back, then raising the hips as high as possible all in an effort to distribute the body weight so it appears the high-jumper is levitating in mid air.

“It really has to do with taking the time to get your body used to the position that it needs to be in,” McBride said. “It's not a very natural movement at all. It takes putting your body into positions that aren’t very comfortable or that you're not very used to.”

In his junior year of high school, McBride was no longer high jumping because he wanted to be alongside his friends, but because he was becoming successful. That lit a fire that McBride fanned all the way to his record-breaking NCAA Championship jump.

Hours of studying, watching videos and practicing movements culminated in a first place finish at the 2014 NCAA Championships, where he made a career best jump of (7-5.75), that crowned him the first high jump champion for ASU in 37 years and placed him second all-time in school history.

This also came at a time after recurring injury issues made McBride question his own ability as a high jumper.

“Yeah, I would definitely put that up there as one of my best college moments in track and field, for sure,” McBride said. “Because leading up to that meet in that specific moment I kept getting to the door of trying to be my best and getting to the door of making it the next level but I just kept falling short.”

A stress fracture from overuse on McBride’s left foot leading up to the NCAA Championships made the jumper continually question: “Is this something I can even do?”

As a high jumper, triple jumper and long jumper for ASU, the constant training took a toll on McBride’s ankle, putting unrelenting pressure and strain on his foot until doctors diagnosed him with a stress fracture, a diagnosis that is extremely limiting for a high-jumper since keeping off the foot is the only way to allow it to heal.

McBride didn’t have time to sacrifice much needed coaching and practice, as he attempted to repeat his success at the NCAA Championships his senior year. However, without giving his ankle time to heal, McBride fell into a never-ending cycle that torpedoed into a rut that proved extremely hard to climb out of.

“Trying to get rehab while also trying to train in high jump kind of counteracted each other because everything I did in rehab I would go out in practice and almost feel like I re-hurt my foot over and over again when I practiced,” McBride said. “But then when I didn't practice, I really started to lose my groove.”

McBride did make it back to the NCAA Indoor Championships, but he was unable to find the same success he had the year before.

McBride pushed on. By the end of March and before his final, senior outdoor season, the high jumper went back to the doctor. The foot had not gotten any better. This time, McBride stopped weightlifting. A month later, at the end of his college career, McBride broke his school record in the Duel of the Desert clearing (7-6.50).

Still feeling some pain in his foot, McBride decided to move his training for the upcoming Olympics to California for a change of scenery.

"Moving on was something we had talked about early in his career," ASU Track & Field Coach Greg Kraft said. "One of the things that's very difficult about the USA system is it's so predicated on shoe companies to sponsor potential athletes so for him, the training center was a natural progression because it allowed them to have free room and board and free medical attention and travel and those kind of things and because of the system being poorly designed, if Bryan wanted to stay in the sport there was really no other alternative than to go there."

He traveled to the Turla Vista Olympic Training Center in California to train under head coach Jeremy Fisher. Here, a typical day begins at 10 a.m. on the fields outside the facility doing uphill sprints, quick feet in the sand and small one-foot bleacher jumps to condition the body before the jump is even a thought. On certain days after conditioning, the jumpers practice their own routines while other days they focus solely on conditioning. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, the athletes head inside at noon for a one-hour lifting session followed by scheduled treatment programs with trainers who provide massages and chiropractic adjustments to restore the body.

Repeat for the next 44 weeks until the Olympic trials roll around in late July.

Then, McBride must be selected as one of the top 24 jumpers in the nation to even get a shot at the Olympic trials, once there, he must place in the top three in his event to qualify for a spot on the Rio team.

The process isn’t an easy one. Yet, in the wake of the physical and mental toll the training takes on McBride’s body, he doesn’t stop jumping.

Instead, he follows the wise words of his father.

"Sometimes I’d tell him how there's just so much I need to do,” McBride said.  “How I always need to be in the treatment room and how I always need to be rehabbing my foot so it's hard to get your body to actually do it and sometimes you just want to go home instead of go to the training room and instead of doing the stuff you’re supposed to do but time and time again my Dad would always tell me, do what you need to do so you can do what you want to do later.”

McBride said that piece of advice kept him from taking the easy way out, from going home, from quitting when his foot nagged at him, and helped him stay focused through every jump.

With his sights set firmly on the upcoming trials, McBride said progress is the one constant that allows the jumper to test his body’s limits while hurdling backwards through the air.  

“I never felt like breaking a record was the most that I could do,” McBride said. “There is always something to fix, always something to change. There’s obviously always a limit to everyone's potential eventually, but I think that for me, it's still up in the air.”

In the air, just like the bar McBride continually sets higher and higher.