It’s hard to find some good competitions this time of year, so I’ve actually spent a lot of time lately searching for good hammer rings. Showing up to a competition in Europe can be a bit of a gamble in this department. For instance, check out this ring fellow UW grad Aretha Thurmond had to throw out of in July. I’ve already found one great ring in Locarno and visited it for four meets this year. My former roommate Sultana Frizell came to visit for the week to get a break from her training camp in Germany. We were table to find a good ring on Wednesday at a meet in Löffingen, a pint sized town in the Black Forest of southwest Germany.

We drove to the meet with Richard and Yvette Bot, Dutch throwers that live in Switzerland and we met in Kamloops at the World Masters Championships last year. Other than us, everyone else at the meet was likely old enough to remember the war in Germany. But, the ring was good and that was enough. Yvette threw a personal best. Richard threw his best throw in seven years and a new record for the Swiss canton of Wallis. Sultan threw over 70 meters again. And I also had my best mark since the Swiss Championships with a throw of 64.15m. I am especially happy with that mark since I was struggling to throw over 60 meters with some throws at practice last week.

If you’ve been reading my posts regularly, you might have forgotten that I actually throw the hammer. I’ve posted about being a spectator. I’ve posted about competing in other throwing events. I’ve even posted about coaching the hammer throw. Well I am now here to remind you that I also compete in the hammer.

Unfortunately, the chances to compete dwindled after the Swiss Championships and it was exactly one month before my next competition. It is amazing how fast the rust sets back in since it felt like my first competition of the season again. I had four sector fouls to begin the competition and ended up throwing 63.15 meters. The result is okay compared to my results this season, but I was disappointed since I started to feel good in the final round, but had run out of attempts by then. My latest competition was on Sunday, but that is a competition I would rather forget. The weather was great and the meet was well run, but my legs were dead. I felt no power whatsoever, partially due to where I am at in my training program and probably also due to another stone throw competition I competed in the day before the meet (which was worth it, I’m improving and took home a cool trophy for winning both the 40- and 50-kg stones). I still was able to win and take home the prize money, which was quickly spent on a nice delicious pizza with a lakeside view in Locarno. This was my fourth meet of the year in Locarno and I think it truly is the best place for a hammer competition in Switzerland. It is a little out of the way, but it more than makes up for it with consistently good weather and people. I definitely wanted to hang out longer, but, as always, I had to head back to Zürich for work on Monday.

It’s a rare opportunity when I guy can put on a powder blue shirt with a edelweiss flower pattern and come off as more masculine, so when I heard about the opportunity to do just that I immediately signed up for the stone throw competition at the 2010 Eidgenössiches Schwing- und Älperfest (ESAF) in Frauenfeld. After all, what is more masculine than seeing who can throw a giant rock the farthest.

Before I explain how the competition went, let me explain a little about the ESAF. The event is the Olympics of traditional Swiss sports. It is held every three years and the main attraction is schwingen, a form of wrestling that is the Swiss national sport and traces its roots back hundreds of years in the Alps. Rather than explain the rules, I suggest you check out this video from the last ESAF in 2007. As you can see, it is an extremely unique and interesting sport to watch and even more fun to watch in person.

It is the environment at ESAF, in addition to the sport, that makes it one of my favorite sporting events to attend. The wrestling arena is packed with nearly 50,000 fans. While tickets have been sold out for months, an equal number of people come without tickets to fill the enormous beer halls showing the matches in the huge grounds surrounding the stadium. Think Super Bowl meets Oktoberfest. Over the course of the two day event over 130,000 bratwurst and 200,000 liters of beer are consumed. It is also a cultural event, with many people wearing traditional Swiss dress and various yodeling groups make their way around the grounds. Perhaps best of all is that the winner becomes a household name and takes their unique share of the $750,000 prize purse: Arnold, a three year old 5’4″ angus bull weighing in at 2,500 pounds.

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.

This week has been busy with two small competitions in the past three days. It has been hard for me to find good meets lately since there is a small break in the European schedule when most countries have their national championships. Switzerland and Germany will have their championships next weekend, France is this weekend, and Italy was last weekend. Even without the conflicts, there are not many good hammer competitions. While I had lined up a competition in Hungary for this weekend, the plans fell through (unfortunately after I bought my plane ticket). Instead, I found a few local “all-comers” type meets to throw in. While I trained through both meets, it has been several weeks since my last competition and I wanted to find one more meet before the Swiss Championships.

My first meet was in Olten, a small town mostly town as a transportation hub since it is located approximately 30 minutes from Zurich, Basel, Luzern, and Bern. I’ve competed at this meet before and wanted to return. Unfortunately, so did many others. With 22 competitors, the competition dragged on for more than two hours. My first two throws felt great, but were sector fouls and by the time I adjusted my technique, I was out of energy from the long day and threw just 62.32m.