Chapter 259 Starting the Season for Sports 1
For the next few days, Zack followed Jake"s training routine and got tired every day, seeing that William was no longer jealous of Zack and didn"t want to talk about it with Jake anymore.
In fact, William was surprised by this, it was obvious that Jake did much stronger training than Zack, but Jake arrived well every day in the dorm and didn"t even look tired and Zack looked exhausted every day.
After a day of training, Jake got a call from John, it seemed that his sponsoring company representative wanted to talk to Jake, Tiffany and Clara were busy with the company as they were the president and so John was a.s.signed to talk to Jake about the marathons.
John had come to Chapel Hill to talk to Jake and so Jake went to the dorm to warn his friends that he could not dine with them and went to talk to John, after a few hours Jake finally arrived at the restaurant where John was waiting.
"Hi John, how have you been?"
"Very well, thanks to you, our sales this year promise to break our previous record for a long time, after that commercial and the Olympics your media exposure has further helped our company sell more."
After seeing the sales reports, the directors of John"s company were delighted to renew their sponsors.h.i.+p with Jake, while Jake was at university they could earn a lot from Jake while he was at university.
In fact, they tried to pay Jake a higher amount of sponsors.h.i.+p by thinking of gaining his trust and perhaps getting a sponsors.h.i.+p contract renewal when Jake joined the NBA.
After all Jake was now a college athlete which would be worth a lot of sponsors.h.i.+p only if he could wear something of the brand in uniform, and a marathon athlete wouldn"t be worth as much as they were paying, just because Jake did the two sports worth the sponsors.h.i.+p.
But after seeing the increase in sales they no longer thought so and we"re glad they could renew sponsors.h.i.+p, a contract of more than $ 5 million over 5 years was a high-end contract even for professional athletes.
They also knew that Jake had a $ 13 million sponsors.h.i.+p-only contract in 3 years if they counted all 4 sponsors, yet all of Jake"s sponsors would be willing to renew this sponsors.h.i.+p.
"So Jake, we got an invitation from the Chicago Marathon organization to compete there this year, so I wonder if you plan to be there in the coming weeks?"
"I"m going to partic.i.p.ate yes, I already organized a regular registration, I didn"t think I needed anything like this."
"You won last year and got a gold medal in the Olympics, so it"s normal for them to want you to partic.i.p.ate in the marathon this year."
"You can count on me, talk to Tiffany so you guys share ads in this year"s marathon, will you be there?"
"Yes, I will be there, I will organize everything personally, if you need a registration for a marathon you can talk to me too, do you want to partic.i.p.ate in any more this year?"
"Yes, I will partic.i.p.ate in New York too, this year I will win."
John was glad to hear that Jake was still competing in two more marathons this year, which was best for his company, of course, it would be nice only if Jake had the intention to win, otherwise he would lose the spotlight he won at the Olympics.
After that Jake and John talked for a while longer before John left, fortunately in a short period of time John and Alan didn"t plan on doing another sponsors.h.i.+p commercial, because they spent so much this year on advertising.
As they thought it would be the last year of sponsors.h.i.+p with Jake the company spent a lot on the commercial earlier this year, thanks to Jake"s advice they were able to save a little and spend less on producing the commercial.
Of course, they had an excellent return on that investment, but they didn"t plan on doing another commercial next year, maybe another 2 years in the last year of their contract with Jake they thought of doing that.
In the next few days, things were going well for Jake, the team started doing the full training preparing for the first game in November, as the play drills started so everyone could see more of Jake"s skills.
The most remarkable fact was that Jake did not miss a pa.s.s in training, even though not knowing well the style of play of his colleagues Jake could still read the moves well and be without any mistakes.
Coach Smith could see that it was Jake"s experience that allowed him to play so well without knowing his teammates" playing style, but it was impossible for Jake to have much more experience than his teammates who also played every game in high school.
Not to mention that Coach Smith learned that Jake had been left out of the team in the first two years of high school, so it was normal for Jake to have less experience than his teammates, only Ed Cota had a similar skill to Jake and also missed a few pa.s.ses.
Jake had a lot of advantage over his teammates because he played over 1200 games in his imagination training s.p.a.ce, it was very difficult for anyone to get over it, in saying that now that Jake was used to it he could train twice a day in his imagination training.
This gave Jake more than 700 games a year of experience, it was essential for him in his quest to become the best NBA player, in fact, Jake already thought he was improving very slowly with all the training resources he had.
Of course, the reason for this was that Jake wanted to split his training to play in all positions, so it would take him 5 times as long to have experience in all positions, which was what made Jake give the best pa.s.ses knowing all the positions on the court.
With that Jake got even more respect from his new teammates, they realized that maybe Jake was better than them in some parts of basketball, after training Vince Carter came to talk to Jake.
"Hi Jake, I thought you played very well today, maybe you could become a team owner if you kept playing like that."
"Thanks, Vince, coming from you is a big compliment, I think you play very well too, will be one of the highlights of our team this year."
"I would rather win than be recognized, if we could win the ACC Tournament in a few months I would be very pleased if we win the NCAA Tournament I will be even happier."
"I agree with you, I came to UNC because I believe we can win this year, the NCAA Tournament is a little harder, but I think we can win with more effort."
Vince had hoped to win these Tournaments, but Jake knew they would win the ACC Tournament and reach the final four of the NCAA Tournament, with Jake on the team he thought they could win these two games and be champion.
They talked some more and then broke up. Jake was happy to talk to an idol he had in his past life, he was already thinking about how he could ask for an autograph from Vince Carter as if it were a joke.
Jake called his mother after training to tell the good news, Jake talked to Eva whenever he could and Eva was very happy whenever she knew Jake was fine and making more friends at the university.
In high school, besides Joseph and the basketball team players Jake did not have many friends and even among the basketball team players, only a few were actually more friends of Jake.
So Eva hoped her son would enjoy this time at university to make more friends and enjoy life more, after all, she knew that Jake already had a lot of money and that didn"t worry her anymore, just the fact that Jake didn"t have many friends and no girlfriends It made Eva sadder.
After another week Jake was doing daily morning training with Zack, after a week following Jake"s training for him every day, Zack no longer tired running 2 km every day.
Jake, who realized this too, took no pity on his friend and doubled Zack"s running routine to 4 km per day, the fitness training at the gym was still the same, Zack wanted to refuse this training and spoke to Jake.
"I don"t think it"s a good idea to increase my training routine now Jake, I"ve just gotten used to this 2km distance per day, so maybe I better adapt before increasing the distance again."
"I don"t think so, you can"t get used to a weak training routine like this one you have to force your body until you get what you want so after you move to 4 km and get used to it will increase to 6 km."
"This way your body will always get better and you won"t stop until you can run a whole marathon smoothly."
"If I do this I cannot end up suffering an injury? At some point, I will reach my limit."
"I do not agree if you always increase the distance by 2 km and one day you reach your limit the most that will happen is you fall on the track without power, only after you reach the extreme that can happen your body can not stand before your stamina."
Jake knew what he was talking about, with this training method only when Zack reached the 20km run a day he would reach the limit, at which point Jake would have to make Zack run one day and rest the next.
4 km of the race is impossible to make a healthy person injured without forcing his body, and Zack doesn"t look like someone who would force his body to complete the 4 km, not to mention that Zack was running at a very low speed, so tired even less.
"So at least let"s increase just another 1km, so I run 3km every day."
"So you won"t feel any challenge, I want you to run a distance you can"t to the satisfaction of when you can, just so you will notice your improvement in the race."
Jake"s training method might not be the best, but to finish a marathon was the right one after Zack wanted him could hire a professional trainer to compete.