Fort Worth Do The Olympics: Heptathlon

It's looking more and more like our one sailing lesson will be it, so we decided to go ahead and hold our grand finale event - the heptathlon!

As the name implies, this event consists of 7 track and field disciplines: 100m hurdles, high jump, shot put, 200m, long jump, javelin and 800m. Traditionally, the first 4 events are held on one day, with the final 3 held the next. Starting in the 1960's, women in the Olympics competed in the pentathlon, but in 1984, the javelin and 800m were added to become the heptathlon. There is a scoring system that uses different equations and factors for each event. As engineers, we had to take advantage of the math! In order to make it work for us, we created another factor for each event, to get us as close as possible to real scoring. That way we could get a feel for our overall ability at this event. We had a simple grid to keep track of our raw scores.

We had previously done all of these disciplines on their own, so we had some knowledge about each. We met at a local middle school track to set up our version of this test of skills. Again, we took some creative liberty to make sure we competed safely and to our ability. First up was the hurdles - homemade, short versions. We took turns running, with one person timing us at the end.

RA has pretty good hurdling form!

Next was the high jump. This was the only thing we couldn't do on-site, so we swapped it out with a standing vertical jump - using J's daughter's finger paints! We first marked our static reach, then made our 3 jumps and measured the difference between the static and highest jump point.

J's impressive jump

Final vertical jump marks

For shot put, L1 had purchased one online and we headed to the sand pit used for the long jump. This made for easy marking and didn't damage any grass.

J's first shot put attempt

Then we ran our 200m "sprint", followed by the long jump. We were glad to have a sand pit and stuck with our initial method of jumping from the edge of the pit instead of off the board usually used (not sure I would have made it to the sand otherwise!).