Reflecting On My First Meet

Right now I’m sitting in the Amsterdam airport waiting to catch my flight home to Seattle. The first leg of my flight gave me some time to reflect on yesterday’s competition. While there were positives and negatives from the meet and I may not have thrown as far as I wanted to, I did achieve much of what I wanted. I started the competition with a lot of energy. My first attempt flew out of my hand and landed at 65.75m. Unfortunately, it also landed just outside of the sector, as did my second attempt. After making a few adjustments, I got a legal throw in the third round and improved again in the fourth and fifth rounds before having a questionable foot foul on my final attempt.  My best throw measured 64.72m.

Positives

• This is my furthest result ever in March and better than all of my depressing results from last season. It feels even better knowing the amount of travel I did on Friday, how I was trying to adjust to jet lag while sleeping on a pull-out bed, and the nature of an international meet (see below). To give you some perspective, the twenty-five male hammer throwers were an average of four meters under their best from last season. And they only traveled a few hours to get to the meet. That bodes well for my prospects this year.
• Competing in an international competition is different than competing in most American competitions. First of all, you must travel to the competition. I travelled for fourteen hours and crossed nine time zones. Second, warm ups are very structured. You must do your general warm up before waiting in the call room for 15 minutes (it was actually a 45 minute wait on Sunday due to a delay) and then warming up again at the ring with just two warm up throws. Finally, the competitions can be very slow. Twenty minutes elapsed between most of my throws on Sunday. Staying warm is difficult in this situation, especially in overcast weather. I have not been able to throw well under these conditions in the past and main reason for traveling to Arles was to get gain experience in this area. I tried out some new things that worked quite well.
• I was able to make adjustments during the meet. My first two throws were sector fouls, but I adjusted to get a legal mark on my third attempt and improve again on my next two throws. This is something that I’ve struggled with recently.
• While it has nothing to do with throwing, I had an awesome dream the night before the competition where I met my life-long goal of going on Jeopardy. Unfortunately I awoke before final Jeopardy, but I know I would have won since the category was baseball stadiums. This falls into the positive category even though it took me a couple of hours to fall back asleep.

Negatives

• I need to throw over 70 meters this year. As my result shows, I have a long way to go before I reach that level.
• My technique was not very good today, especially when compared to the past few weeks of training. As you can see in the video below, my shoulders were tight rather than relaxed, I stood up slightly on the first turn, and my right foot was landing late in a few other turns. These are all problems that I’ve almost eliminated in training and I need to eliminate them in competitions too.

The positives of this meet definitely outweigh the negatives. I’ll return to Seattle later today and get right back to training. I will have plenty of time to fix these problems since my real season will not start up for another two months. Unless I’m feeling particularly eager to compete, my next competition will be at the end of May in Germany.