When Athletes Blog - Soon to Be Olympian David Oliver

Running on the European track circuit is not easy, as a matter of fact it should qualify for the cable television show "Dirty Jobs" with Mike Rowe.

David Oliver took to his blog to share with fans the gritty and glamorous side of doing his thing while winning races. As we called it yesterday, he managed to come out on top at the Monaco Super Grand Prix, while feeling less than his best.

"You Are Only As Good As You Are On Your Off Days" "Is a quote that I take from Brooks to heart, everybody can do it when it's easy, but when the chips are down, what will you do? For those of you that were able to catch the race on wcsn, you know exactly what I am talking about.

I had a pretty decent warm-up, it wasn't great, but I knew I had more than enough to get the job done. Of course we had the customary false start from someone in the field. I came out the blocks on the re-start and on my fourth step out, I don't know what happened but it felt like I hit a dip and my hips dropped. That threw my first hurdle off, which threw the entire rest of my race off. I ended up hitting 7 of the 10 hurdles, but I was able to clean up my last two hurdles, finish in my customary strong fashion by dominating the critical zone once again and pull out a tough win.

My left quad has been tight since the race in London and that happens to be my trail leg, so today, I couldn't get the action from it I was looking for and it was causing my trail leg to be severely late, causing me to fall to the right, reverting to what I was looking like late in the indoor season. I ran 13.11 (-0.8w), Anwar was second in 13.19 and Jason Richardson ran a strong 13.23 for third. Like I said, if my off day is 13.11, a Super Grand Prix win and a 14 stack deposit into my Bank Of America account, then I am doing certain things correctly. I hope I got my bad one out of the way for the season, I can't afford a race like that at the Games! I'm off to Beijing tomorrow afternoon, I think I'm going to catch a helicopter to Nice from Monaco instead of the bus to the airport, I'm going to high-side on 'em! LOL."

Click here to read David Oliver's blog.

By Jay Hicks.