I thought I would post a quick note before heading down to the Swiss Championships tomorrow morning. The competition itself isn’t until Saturday afternoon. My first event will be the hammer in Locarno, where I competed last week. Immediately after the competition, I will head into nearby Lugano for the main portion of the meet, where I will throw the shot put. Both cities are beautiful and the weather should sunny and nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Swiss Athletic Federation’s preview of the meet lists me as one of only three clear favorites in the meet, mostly due to the lack of depth in the hammer throw. My friend Roland Widner is the second seed at 57 meters, so all I should need to do is toss a decent legal throw. Throwing in the sector hasn’t always been the easiest thing for me to do, but I think it is acheiveable and ass a result I’ve set my goals higher than that. My training has been going well for the past few weeks (see some new video below) and I hope this will be the meet where training success finally carries over to competition success. It is bound to happen sometime and this will be one my first meets this year where I will not have to battle with poor weather, a slow ring, or a two-hour long competition.

I’ve been both looking forward to and dreading this week for a few months. I’ve spent the first few days of the week packing up my apartment in Kamloops. This afternoon I’ll be heading back to Seattle, where I will spend tomorrow packing my bags for Europe before leaving on Friday morning for three months in Zürich. It feels exhausting just writing that sentence. While it will be rough to be away from my family, girlfriend, coach, and training partners, it will be nice to once again have an income and have a good training base for the European part of my season.

Training has been going very well. And by “well” I mean both my technique and strength are near their all-time bests and I’m still in the middle of hard training. Or, as Dr. B puts it: “Good result, bad state.” On Monday I actually threw further in training than I did right before I threw my personal best (you can see a video below). I’m don’t ever throw far in training, so my results have been very encouraging. I can’t wait to compete against some of the world’s best in the coming months. In the meantime, my posts on this site and my other sites (CollegeHammer.com and HSHammer.com) may be intermittent until I get accustomed to my new surroundings. I will, however, always keep you up to date on my meet results and will also have a great post up very soon providing a one-month training log showing exactly what my training looks like every day.

Sometimes I get jealous of distance runners. While runners need a coach, they can also train alone easier. This comes in handy when traveling home for the holidays. In hammer throwing, there is no replacement for the eye of your coach, critiquing your every move at practice. I was back in Seattle for less than a month over Christmas, but it was enough time for my technique to acquire some rust. Since arriving back in Kamloops two weeks ago, I’ve been busy fixing it up again.

As was the case in the fall, Dr. Bondacrhuk has been focusing on the start of the throw. The start of the throw is the most important part of the throw; if a throw does not start out well, the thrower’s balance and rhythm get thrown off. It is nearly impossible to correct these points when accelerating through turns with several hundred pounds of force pulling away from you. My start has had two problems. First, I don’t keep my knees bent throughout the first turn; once the hammer’s orbit starts to rise, I often rise with it. Second, I cut the hammer’s orbit short on the left side of my throw. With the hammer, you want it to have a long orbit; cutting the orbit short will slow down the hammer and ruin my rhythm. I was making progress with both of these points in the fall (see the video and post here) and am slowly getting back to that level. Take a look at the video below to see how I looked at practice last week. The one positive is that I am still in great shape and my power is better than ever. I am throwing the 8.2-kilogram (18-pound) hammer in the video and making it look lighter than I ever have before.

When I returned to Kamloops, Dr. B also switched up my training. At the start of January I was in the heart of some intense workouts that focused a lot of special strength. While I gained a lot from the workouts, they were some of the hardest I’ve ever done and my body was ready for a break. My new program is just that: I am throwing more light hammers and doing minimal lightweight lifts in the weight room. This is Dr. B’s version of active rest.

All the special strength training I’ve done this fall is really starting to pay off. Both my technique and power are progressing quite nicely. Check out this video to see some of the progress I’ve made.

I received a new training program last week. For the month prior I had been doing a high volume of work focusing on what we call “special strength” (e.g. working the core muscles used to accelerate the hammer). Coach Bondarchuk told me that the prior program would wear me down and it would take me [...]