Lessons I learned from Mike Pascuzzo

Published: 2025-03-30

On March 17, 2025, I learned about the passing of Mike Pascuzzo, a high jump coach I worked with since June 2023. Despite the short amount of time I had with Mike, he fixed a lot of my blindspots in high jump, many of them are related to the mindset of being a high jumper. In memory of Mike, I decide to write down five lessons that stuck with me most.

5 lessons I learned from Mike

High jumpers are Zen

Mike always accused me of being too smart. He has his point, that I tends to let thinking dominate feeling (Although I think there is a happy middle ground somewhere), which could lead to overthinking and underperforming. Over the one and a half years I worked with Mike, the main thing I picked up from him is simply let the body take control some times. High jumpers are Zen, if we try too hard to force a jump, we would end up sacrificing our rhythm, our balance, and our feeling of the body.

“When you are thinking, you are tight. And when you are tight, your angles are off. When your angles are off, the physics works againsst you. I shouldn’t need to tell you you cannot beat physics.” Perhaps one of the worse decisions I made was telling Mike I was trained as an astrophysicist, and worse of all specialized in gravity. He never stop nagging me about being too smart (Again, happy middle ground, it is who I am afterall.), while in my mind I am not actually aware of my own thoughts.

I still get accused by others coaches for being too smart, which I get annoyed since dumbing it down is not an option, I don’t even know what the hell that supposed to mean. But I do know how to pretend to be dumber now: Take a deep breath, close my eyes, feel my veins and neurons, and listen to them. Whenever I have to deliver a big jump, I now tell myself I have practiced enough, just trust it is going to pay off, listen to the body, and hit it. In a way, I think this is what Mike meant by Zen.

High jumpers have the toughest mindset of all athletes

“In all other event, you never know you are going beyond your limit until you did it. Like long jump, you ran, you take off, someone come to congratulate you about your new PR. Same with sprinting, you try your best, crossed the line, then you just ran your fastest time ever. But not high jump and pole vault. You set the bar up, and you know this will be the first time you ever clear this bar should you succeed. That’s why high jumpers are the toughest, we need to withstand the pressure of becoming the best version of ourselves, and we are going to do it over and over again.”

I was listening to him giving this speech to some of the younger athletes in his clinic, and just after he mentioned “high jumpers are the toughest”, I already knew what follows. Yet, knowing this fact is one thing, embracing it is another thing. Every high jumper has probably stood in front of a high bar and thought to ourselves, “Dang this is a high bar”. High jump is an abnormal activities, so it is normal to feel nervous or innate fear when we see something that is seemingless impossible or unnatural.

Mike saw my fear sometime, and one day he asked me: “What athlete are you?” I replied I am a high jumper. “That’s right, it is call the high jump not the low jump. So when the bar is high, that’s why we are here! It’s party time! I have to jump all these stupid low bars to get here, so embrace it and just clear this.”

From time to time fear still get the best of me, but since the conversation we had, I do sometimes be able to get excited enough to deliver a good jump despite the innate fear of doing an impossible.

Be kind to yourself

This was not directed to me, but a younger athlete in the clinic who seems to get really fustrasted because she couldn’t clear a bar. I didn’t catch exactly the context, but I did remember how it ended:

“We fail more than we succeed. If we always clear a bar, that just means we are not challenging ourselves enough. I understand why you are frustrated, but high jumpers cannot let frustration gets the better of us. There are good days and there are bad days, be kind to yourself on a bad day.”

When I drove home that day, I thought about this a lot. Sometimes in pursuit of a goal, I do forget to enjoy and accumulate stress, which eventually leads to minor burnouts. It’s important in the long run to be kind to yourself.

Best coaching is self coaching

Mike often says this phrase in his high jump clinic. I never stopped wondering how is that good for business, but I know this comes from a genuine place. Mike told me he was jumping on his own until he was coached by Dwight Stone (Former world record holder) in his late 20s, and before that it was up to himself to figure out how things need to be.

I had quite a number of coaches in the past when I was in Hong Kong. While I respect their effort, it is fair to say they are not really professional or seriously invested in me. Some of them are just senior students that are a couple of years older than me at the time, some of them are successful athletes by Hong Kong standards, but that is more because they are more athletic instead of coming from a good system. Before I restart high jump at 26, my PR was 1.85m in the first year of my undergraduate, and it went down hill from there despite I put more time in high jump. So when I restarted high jump in 2021, I decided to rely on myself, it went well for a while, for I tuned myself to jumped over 2m.

But after a while, I felt limited again, that’s when I met Mike. Even though I haven’t gotten another PR since I trained with him, he did give me some new perspective on how to approach the technical models of high jump. Perhaps he is right, best coaching is indeed self coaching, since I am the only person who knows how my body feels. Coaches are not god, they are not always right. But their experience do provide me some insight on how I can incorporate their feedbacks into my training. In a weird way, “Best coaching is self coaching” is the biggest validation Mike has given me.

What worse than not practicing is practicing the wrong thing

I think I have quite some grit in me, and turns out that could be bad for me. When I was training by myself, I often take 20-30 jumps in a session, mostly because high jump is just too much fun. I would push myself until I am broken, and do it again in two days, telling myself I need to push through. That was how I operate when I was in Hong Kong, and that pattern leaked into the first years of my training.

One day I was in Mike’s clinic, didn’t feel great over all but not a terrible day. In the second rotation, Mike suddenly told me to cut it. I was confused for a second, then I realized my form is breaking and I am just repeating a worse and worse pattern. Mike told me: “If you are too tire to practice the right thing, you are too tired to practice. So go home and get some rest. What worse than not practicing is practicing the wrong thing.” I felt uneasy at the moment, since the commute from NYC to Mike’s warehouse is about two and a half hours one way in total. But on the train back to NYC, my quad was so sore that I could barely walk. That was the first time I realize maybe the mode of training I had in the past is not sustainable, and all the injuries I had in the past made so much more sense.

I still struggle to keep the training volume down, and luckily I have another good coach to monitor my load now. But Mike’s words make me realize sometimes, it is for the sake of my progress that I stop. It’s about going in the right direction, not just keep walking.

Moving on

I am on the older side of Mike’s students, and one thing that keep me going (other than my ambition to go to the Olympics) is Mike would always remind me that his PR was when he was 32, and he tided his PR at age 33. I always said I am not quitting until I beat him and I am 29 at the moment of writing this post. It is unfortunate that he will not be able to witness me beating his PR and going to the Olympics, but now he is not with us, I cannot change my mind and quit before reaching either of those goals. As an athlete, I face countless moments of doubt: I am old, not talented, not training with the best facilities in the world, etc. Yet, I am peron of my word, always have been, to that, I will do everything I can to reach my goals, so one day I can tell Mike’s story in front of a camera.