Forbach Recap

Last Sunday I travelled up to France to compete in the small border town of Forbach for the Meeting Internationale de Forbach. Here is a quick recap of how it all played out.

The Setting
Tucked behind a hill and castle overlooking the city, the stadium was small but very intimate. Fans filled the stands and enjoyed the warm and sunny weather. Plus, we were able to throw both in the stadium and during the main portion of the meet. This is unheard of in the hammer throwing world. The meet was televised and they introduced us using the Fox Sunday Football theme music.

Competitors
The field was also very good. This meeting is one of the stops on French national circuit and brought together a great field with five throwers with bests over 73-meters. With so few prize money meets now offering the hammer throw, almost anyone can put together an elite field by simply putting a few hundred bucks into prize purse. We had throwers from Finland, Sweden, Egypt, Switzerland, and across France at the meet. Seeing small successful meets like this makes me wonder why there are not more of them in America.

The Competition
Unfortunately everyone started off a little flat. All of the top throwers were two to four meters under their personal bests. I was no exception. I ended up coming around in the final efforts and improving my season best to 62.97m. However that was still well short of my goal for the competition. The competition was won by David Söderberg (Finland) with 74.83m; Frédéric Pouzy (France) took a close second with 74.43m; and my friend Mattias Jons (Sweden) placed third.

The Positives
Many times I will either start the competition well and get better, or start the competition bad and get worse. This was a rare exception where I started poorly but improved. My best attempt was my final attempt. As you can see in the video below, my technique was also very stable. You can also see one old problem in my technique that decided to return: I stood up a little during the first turn.

The Negatives
I was actually quite pleased with everything except the result. I’m working on that part and I hope it will be arriving soon.

Next Up
My next competition will be the Swiss Club Championships on Saturday in Geneva, but don’t get your hopes up for a PR. I have trained hard this week and my body is still adjusting to the new program I began before Forbach. I’m a bit sore and tired. That might have contributed to the results in Forbach, but at least I rested the day before the meet there. This week I will not. The main goal of the competition will be to win and that will only require a throw of 55 meters. I obviously hope to throw beyond that, but I also want to save energy for the shot put and try to get some more points for my team there. My next bigger meet will be on Sunday the 13th back my favorite hammer town of Fränkisch-Crumbach.