Feature: Dreams Delayed

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – As Little Rock track and field student-athletes grapple with a lost season, they have no better empathizer than Lexi Jacobus. A 2016 Olympian and four-time NCAA Champion turned volunteer coach for the Trojans, Jacobus was primed to make another run to compete on the world's grandest stage this summer.
 
After joining the coaching staff last year, Jacobus quickly made an impact on Little Rock's Team. During the indoor season she guided a pair of freshmen in the pole vault with Tricia Pierce breaking the school record (Pierce's best mark of the indoor season came in at 12-5.5/3.80m). When she wasn't coaching the Trojans, she was focusing on her own pole vaulting alongside her sister, Tori Hoggard, in the duo's drive for the Olympics.
 
The stars had aligned for Jacobus. She had joined the coaching staff alongside her husband, Derek, while she and her sister had deferred entrance into pharmacy school at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) for a year so they both could focus on preparing for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
 
Both Jacobus and the Trojans had completed their indoor season and had turned their focus to the 2020 outdoor season. Jacobus was slated to compete at several of the nation's premier track and field competitions like the Texas Relays, Drake Relays and the Mt. Sac Relays as well as some meets in her native Arkansas. That was before the sports world grounded to a screeching halt.
 
"It was crazy how fast everything happened," Jacobus recalled. "One-by-one, events started getting canceled then the NCAA Championship seasons were canceled."
 
A 2019 graduate of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Jacobus knew the impact that the NCAA's decision had made. Several of her former teammates had already made the trip to Albuquerque, New Mexico for the 2020 NCAA Indoor Championships.
 
"I have some really close friends on that team," she said. "They were there and it was supposed to start the next day then all of a sudden the NCAA announced it was canceled."
 
While NCAA Championships for both winter and spring sports had been canceled, regular season meets were still on the schedule as various schools and conferences reviewed how to best approach a pandemic that was quickly spreading across America. But as those also began to get canceled, the idea of this being an Olympic year soon began to evaporate.
 
"That is what everyone was thinking about," Jacobus said of the world's foremost sports competition. "Obviously international travel was starting to become extremely difficult and going to Japan, located right next to China, is pretty scary. Postponement was something everyone was expecting. We just didn't know if they would attempt to postpone it a couple months or just wait until next year."
 
The decision to turn Tokyo 2020 into Tokyo 2021 came on March 24 as the International Olympic Committee pushed the event back a year to (hopefully) allow the pandemic to recede. But now track and field athletes, whose competitive nature is built into cyclical training, just had their worlds turned upside down.
 
Track and field athletes preparing for spring and summer competition normally start working in August with strength conditioning and base training. As the season approaches, the workouts shift away from strength and moves towards technical to refine the techniques used and to gear towards peak performance for championship meets in the summer, such as the USATF Championships. That championship meet in an Olympic year becomes Olympic qualifying for Team USA.
 
"Now that there is no outdoor season, how do you approach this with training?" Jacobus wonders. "It is so important to continue the cycle. You can't go into an offseason training program for the next 8-to-10 months because your body can't handle those kinds of workouts this yearly. It is going to be tough to figure out what exactly we are going to do."
 
Working with her training partner/sister Haggard and her coach, Morry Sanders, Jacobus now has to reimagine her training while getting over the mental frustration of the perfect timing no longer being perfect.
 
"For me, it is frustrating because I have been mentally prepared for it to happen and the timing was working out as I was getting ready to start pharmacy school," Jacobus explained. "Tori and I actually took a year off from pharmacy school to train for Tokyo. Now that it is pushed back a year, I do want to start pharmacy school this fall so it will be another challenge added for me - school and track. But I decided that I don't want to push my professional pharmacy school back any longer because it is still four more years of school with that."
 
Despite a year's delay and the upcoming balance she will face with pharmacy school and international competition, Jacobus has one very identifiable bonus working in her favor. In the incredibly singular competitive world of track and field, she is able to continue to train alongside her identical twin sister.
 
"A lot of professional [track and field athletes] train by themselves or maybe in a small group," Jacobus explained. "I couldn't do it without Tori. When we are going through workouts and are out there on the track, having her there and her pushing me, we are just working together. It helps so much and it would be so hard to do it by yourself. I am so thankful we have each other, that we can go through this together and we can help each other out."
 
Jacobus also has the added bonus of being able to empathize with Little Rock student-athletes who also had their outdoor season abruptly canceled.
 
"I know what it feels like because I am there too," she explains. "You just have to be encouraging and you have to remind them that it is not the end of sports, it is just a brief postponement. You have to stay in shape, you can't just sit back and wait until next year. You have to stay in shape, stay with it and stay positive. No one can change it so you just have to make the best of it and be ready for when it starts again. It is tough and my heart really does go out to them."
 
Now Jacobus will use the extra time to further refine her training in hopes of making a repeat visit to the Olympics while at the same time continuing to be a mentor figure to the Trojan pole vaulters.
 
For the latest information on Little Rock Track & Field, make sure to check out LRTrojans.com. You can also find the team on social media at @LittleRockTFXC on Facebook and Twitter.
 
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