Meet Recap: Swiss Championships
Published on 18 July 2010 in Results | 5 Comments |
Congratulating my friend and runner-up Roland Widmer after the competition.
I just got back to Zürich after a long, but fun, weekend at the Swiss Championships that ended with another gold medal. It all started off on Friday, when I took the day off of work and headed down early to the meet. This allowed me to get a pre-meet training session in, a quick appointment with our team physiotherapist, and meet up with my family (who have been touring around Switzerland this month) for a pleasant dinner at the Castelgrande overlooking Bellinzona.
As I posted a few days ago, my main goal for this competition was just to repeat what I have been doing in training. Training has been going well and I’ve been on the verge of a season’s best for a few weeks. Unfortunately, my technique has been terrible in competitions lately. This weekend, however, I finally kept my technique together. I opened with a decent 63 meter throw that secured the national title. I then pressed a little too hard in the next few rounds, before finding my form in my final two attempts. My fifth attempt saw the hammer fly out to 66.60m. The official marking the throw in the field was cheering in excitement after seeing where it landed, but then frowned after looking up and seeing I had clipped the front of the ring with my foot. My final attempt was legal, thankfully, and measured out to a season’s best of 66.03m. It was also a new Swiss leading mark and my fifth best result ever.
The meet was incredibly fun. The crowd in Locarno was unexpectedly large considering the hammer throw was held nearly an hour away from the main competition venue. Locarno loves the hammer throw and is the home of the Samuele Dazio, the second furthest thrower in Swiss history. Thanks to Paul Merca, we even got some international press coverage for the event. In addition to meeting my technical goals, I also reached a few other goals. First, I had a side bet for some beer with my training partner Rebecca Bähni. I gave her a ten meter handicap since her season’s best was almost exactly ten meters under mine. She won the women’s competition with a throw of 55.83m and looked set to win our bet until my last throw, which barely won the bet for me. My other goal was to try to record the largest margin of victory for the meet. Looking back at the online results of the meet since 1981, the largest margin of victory was 14.13m by Dazio in 2003, which just happened to be my first Swiss Championship. My margin of victory was 14.33 meters, so I narrowly reached that goal too. To be fair though, I was hoping to reach this goal with both silver medalist Roland Widmer and I throwing further. Roland has not been able to train much the past month due to travel and I know I also have a few extra meters in me too.
My last goal was to win a medal in the shot put and potentially win an eight title at the meet for LC Zürich. I had been practicing the event with the goal of causing an upset. I was late for the call room, and that gave me some adrenaline to have some great warm ups, however, after that, my energy level crashed. I think a combination of 96º temperatures (107º heat index when you factor in the humidity), standing up all day, and driving back to Lugano was just too much for my body. I managed a decent throw of 14.54m and placed 5th, my highest ever at the meet. I thought I would need 15 meters to medal, and bronze was won in 15.01m. I know what to do next year, and you can expect me to definitely win two medals at that meet.
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5 Responses to “Meet Recap: Swiss Championships”
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Name: Mémorial Kops, Ludivig & Reuter
Date: 19 May 2012
Location: Ettelbruck, Luxembourg
Nice Job Martin!
I noticed you switched to the Nike Sd’s. Any specific reason?
On a fast ring, I still prefer the Mizunos. They have a feel that the other shoes just can’t match. However, there a quite a few old rings in Europe that have the texture of sandpaper, and my Mizunos were just feeling a little slow. I decided to give a faster shoe a try and picked Nike since I found an old pair on sale. Until I get free shoes from a sponsor, my loyalties are flexible and will likely hang on the latest sales.
I threw with the Zoom Rotationals at UW since we had a contract with Nike, but they were too firm for my liking (although Sultana loves them). In my first week with the SDs, they seem to have a good combination of speed and feel. It is hard to have both, but they find a middle ground between the Rotationals and the Mizunos. They are also keeping my feet dry. The mesh upper on the Mizuno left my feet soaked every morning from the dew since I am throwing on grass again (we had dirt in Kamloops).
Great job Martin! Do you have any more competitions this summer?
Thanks Chris, and nice throwing by you lately too. I was planning on leaving in two weeks, but I feel like I’ve got much more in me this season. Since there are no more meets left in the States, I extended my contract at work in Zürich and will stay until the end of September. The competition schedule will be calm until the European Championships are over, but after that I already have another four meets lined up from mid-August until mid-September and am also considering a few more.