But instead of an underground bare-knuckles brawl, this was an above ground — 10, 12, sometimes 15 feet above ground — white-knuckle affair.
With one exception, the eight were some of the area’s best young pole vaulters — high flyers like Fairmont High School’s Natalie Uy, who is headed to Eastern Michigan University, Fairmont senior David Kimbrell and Sam Wagner, a prep standout in Wisconsin now stationed at Wright Patterson Air Force Base — who had gathered for one of the workout sessions of local vault guru and Wayne High coach Terry Wesson, who sat in a nearby lawn chair with his iPad camera at the ready.
One by one the young athletes stepped from their shoulder-to-shoulder ranks along the long, black rubberized runway and prepared to sprint down the approach with pole in hand and launch themselves at the overhead yellow cord that served as a bar.
As Uy readied for her first effort, the next-up vaulters were a pair of 16-year-olds, one who was 14, two 18-year-olds and then Bob, who was nearly the same age as all five teens combined.
A retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who lives in Kettering and has six grandkids of his own, he was a college vaulter more than a half century ago.
Bob Arledge is 80.
He will compete in the 2013 National Senior Games — the Senior Olympics — in Cleveland on Wednesday. He not only has a good chance of winning his 80-84 age category (he was second in the nation at the indoor games in Landover, Md,. four months ago), but he will be trying to break the national record for his group. It’s 7 feet, 7 inches and he has jumped just an inch below that.
“Look, I’m not trying to set the world on fire,” he said with a grin. “At my age, I’m just trying to keep the fire burning inside.”
The way he is going about that is just as remarkable as the vaults he’s actually making.
He trains regularly with some of the best young vaulters from the area.
“I used to get beat up when I did it,” said the 53-year-old Wesson, an accomplished vaulter himself once. “I can’t imagine going down the runway at Bob’s age. It’s pretty impressive.”
So is the way he fits in with the kids, Wesson said: “It’s been pretty seamless.”
The 16-year-old Kimbrell agreed: “I love Colonel Bob. It’s awesome he’s still competing. He’s just a cool dude who’s super nice to everyone.”
Stephanie Spurgin, who had brought her 14-year-old daughter Saraea, a Northmont freshman, to the session, was sitting nearby. She likes hearing such talk about Arledge:
“He’s an inspiration to these kids and I love that. My generation, we were taught to respect your elders, but too often now days young people just see them as old people.
“I’ve tried to raise my kids differently and I see that now with Sarera. She’s all fired up that he still does this — that he loves the sport just like all the kids do — and she tells all her friends about him.”
Dusting off memories
For Arledge, these evening training sessions at a homemade vaulting area are déjà vu moments.
When he grew up on a farm in Lancaster, southeast of Columbus, he and a friend dug their own pole-vault pit in an empty field, filled it with hay and saw dust, put up a cross bar and began their often-bruising practices.
“Our high school coach wouldn’t let anyone vault until they first showed they could walk the width of the football field on their hands,” Arledge said. “The sport was a lot different back then. It was more of a strength and gymnastics event. You muscled your way over the bar. Now it’s speed and swing. You have a pole that snaps and throws you.
“In high school we used a bamboo pole that didn’t bend. And getting over the bar was only half of it. As soon as you cleared, you had to worry about landing on your feet and rolling. It wasn’t like now, where the pit is filled with foam and you land on your back.
“Back then, even when you did land on your feet, there were a lot of injuries. Guys would break their legs, things like that.”
Arledge became a track athlete at Otterbein University and was clearing 12 feet, which was quite competitive in those days. But once he graduated, he forgot about the sport, got physical therapy training at the Cleveland Clinic and then joined the U.S. Air Force in 1957.
Over the next three decades he was stationed all across the country, worked as a physical therapist and finally retired in 1988.
He and his wife Gail have three children, Chip, Jennifer and Cara, who was an All-American soccer player at the University of Dayton and is in the school’s athletic hall of fame.
“I fell in love with UD through my daughter and I began going to all their sporting events — volleyball, men’s and women’s soccer, baseball, football and basketball,” he said. “It was good entertainment for me.”
But watching sports didn’t alleviate the challenges of retirement and soon, he said, he had gained 20 pounds and his blood pressure was up.
“I heard where the average life expectancy of a full colonel in the Air Force, once they retired, is only eight years and I believe it,” he said.” I’ve had so many friends retire and they just kind of sat around and drank and smoked and ate and then, they died. When you retire, you need a purpose in life, a goal.”
He became a board member and a tutor at the faith-based Dayton Urban Ministry Center on Otterbein Avenue in west Dayton and he also does physical therapy work at the Oak Creek Terrace, an assisted living and nursing home in Kettering.
A decade ago – after someone suggested he try the Senior Olympics – he brushed the dust off the 50-year-old memories and decided to try pole vaulting again. But he soon realized he had a lot to learn.
“The sport is so different now,” he said. “There are no more bamboo poles, it’s all fiberglass and to be truthful, at first they kind of scared me. I wasn’t used to the bending. It was like going from the Wright B. Flyer to an F-16.”
Mutual admiration
The first thing he did was become a regular at the Wright-Patterson AFB gym and then at the Trent Arena fitness center.
“I had to lose weight and build up my arm strength and core muscles so I could pull myself up easier,” he said. “I had to start running again, too, so I could sprint down the runway. I didn’t want to get out there and completely embarrass myself.”
At UD , he had met Dave Servis, a top-10-in-the-world vaulter while at Occidental College in the early 1960s who briefly coached the Flyers’ women vaulters before taking on the same job at Centerville High.
Arledge was invited to step into the Elks’ training sessions if he wanted and did so hesitantly at first.
“I’d take a lawn chair and sit there and wait my turn,” he said. “At first one girl came over and talked. The next night there were two and by the third night they all came over. I went home that night and told my wife, ‘Well, I’m one of the girls now.’ ”
Through Servis — who is having some health issues now and is not at the training sessions — Arledge met Wesson, who offers extra training sessions for vaulters not just in the summer, but in the winter at the McLin Gym inside the Nutter Center.
“I was terrible when I first came back, I was probably jumping about 5 feet,” Arledge said. “But I’ve improved a little each year since and have gotten up to 7 ½ feet.
“The thing that’s been toughest for me has been injuries. At my age it’s so easy to get hurt. I’ve got a bad shoulder I dislocated a couple times. I hyper-extended my left elbow and I had a heel cord inflammation in my right Achilles that has given me problems.
“Sometimes my wife wonders what in the heck I’m doing. At the Senior Olympics in Louisville I pulled my right hamstring real bad. She had to drive home while I lay in the back seat with an ice bag on my leg.”
The payoff is worth it, he said. The physical activity makes him feel better and the interaction with the teenagers keeps him young: “They are wonderful to be around. When I’m around them they lift me. They really lift me.”
While he said there are some generational gaps neither side has been able to vault (“I’m a Mozart guy and like bluegrass and B.B. King and Frank Sinatra and I’m sure they’ve probably have never heard any of that, same as I don’t know their favorites”), they have developed a real camaraderie.
Arledge and the 18-year-old Uy — who finished second at the state meet with a 12-foot-3 pole vault, was fourth in the high jump and 11th in the hurdles — are especially close
“Natalie is great,” he said. “In college I think she’ll be a real superstar. She just does so many events well. And there’s a lot more to her than that. We go to the same church (Christ United Methodist) and she sings in the choir there. She’s just got it all figured out — the physical, the mental, the spiritual.
“She tells me I’m her hero, but she is my hero, too. She’s just such a good kid. All of them out here are just wonderful. … With them, I know the world will be in good hands. “
Natalie said: “The admiration is mutual. I tell my own dad, you’ve got to be like him and keep exercising. He’s just such a role model and we really get along well.”
You could see that during the training session.
When Arledge charged down the runway in his electric blue shoes and executed a good vault, Natalie immediately piped in: “Oh yeah, that was it!”
All the vaulters pull for each other, in part because their efforts are personal triumphs as much as battles against other competitors.
“After a vault, when everything went well, you get an endorphin high,” Arledge said. “And at my age to be able to get up in the air and come back down, it’s exhilarating. The whole thing is just addictive.
“I think it’s the same for the young kids, too. In practice when they make a good jump they’ll pop up and pump their fists or just say ‘Yes!’ Sometimes, when it’s really good, they might even do a back flip.”
Might he go that far?
“Maybe,” he said with a laugh. “One day I might just try one.”
After all, he said these young vaulters do really lift him.
About the Author