The Swiss team for the 2011 European Cup Winter Throwing: Nicola Müller, Rebecca Bähni, Lydia Wehrli, and myself (l-r)
Right now I’m in Sofia, Bulgaria for the European Cup Winter Throwing. This is my first competition of the 2011 season and, to get straight to the point,
mercurial fg, I didn’t reach my expectations for the meet.
I am the type of thrower that normally throws several meters further in competitions. My all-time training best is just 66 meters and I’ve been throwing between 62 and 64 meters in training recently. My goal for the competition was a result around 65 or 66 meters,
tods online store, so that was very realistic based on my training results. Instead I threw 62.48m. The main problem today was that I forgot to tell my body that it was a competition rather than another training session. After the meet I felt like I had just taken six throws at 80% intensity. My technique was decent, but I just didn’t accelerate the hammer much. It has been more than six months since my last competition, so I guess I just had to knock off a little rust. Since training has been going well, I am not going to panic about this one. I also was able to finish in a pack just behind some other 70 meter throwers and I had no foul trouble at all (although I had one foul overturned by an official).
A few other factors may have come into play today. Mainly, I tweaked my back in training this week and was more tentative to throw at full intensity. But also our competition was delayed for one hour after we had warmed up, the weather was very cool, the freshly poured concrete was literally crumbling under our feet, and I had a distracting little verbal argument with an official over the mistaken foul. That may sound like a bunch of excuses, but I’m not trying to excuse my performance. Even with these factors I still should have thrown over 65 meters. Not every competition will be perfect and I need to be able to focus and adapt to however the situation presents itself. My friend Mattias Jons of Sweden was able to overcome all of that to throw a near personal best of 73.99m.
Now I have one more day to watch my three teammates compete and see a little more of Sofia. Flying into the town, my expectations were quite low. From above Sofia looked like a map from Sim City, with rows of nearly identical nondescript apartment buildings placed straight wide boulevards. Parks and office buildings were randomly thrown in the mix too. But after exploring the city yesterday, I found the city more interesting than my first impression. It lacks the tourist attractions of other European capitals, but it was nevertheless fun to just wander around around the city’s core. As the team leader of the Swiss team (mostly because I was the first to arrive and no coach was sent along), I was also invited to the mayor’s house for wine and short speech last night. That experience once again showed me that track and field is more respected in Europe. Would the mayor of an American city with more than a million people go out of their way to do such a thing? I doubt it. But, even though the sport is more respected, it still is not any more popular. A healthy crowd showed up to watch the competition,
ghd stylers, but it was comprised mostly our teammates and coaches.
Tomorrow I fly back to Zurich, back to work, and back to training. Today was a test (which perhaps I failed) and now I know where I have to begin my season from. The core of my season doesn’t start until May. Seventy meters is within reach this year, but to get there I must work a lot on my technique before the next meets begin.