It’s been a busy weekend. Over the past 48 hours I have competed twice and racked up nearly 600 miles on our rental car. I’ve competed at one of the best speciality meets in the world, won the hammer throw and a watch at the only Swiss Meeting that includes it, caught up with many friends, and returned home with enough time to do laundry before I have to return to work tomorrow. It was exhausting, but it was fun.

The first big event of the weekend was the Fränkisch-Crumbach international hammer meet in Germany. This is my fifth year at the event, which packs thousands of fans into the town park to gossip, grab a beer, and, of course, watch hammer throwing. I’ve written about how great the meet is every year, so there is little to add this year. Once again the meet management and fans did not let me down and I tied for my my highest ever finish at the meet.

Another week and another unplanned competition added to my schedule. This time I went to Olten yesterday for their season opening all-comers meet. I’ve had good luck in Olten the last few years and it continued yesterday afternoon as I launched a big season’s best of 65.27 meters and then got to watch two of the girls I coach also throw personal bests.

I followed up a decent result in Basel last week with a week full of season training bests from the 10-kilogram to the 7.26-kilogram hammer. I knew I was ready to throw in another meet. My technique did not quite hold up in Basel, but after the competition I knew I was ready for 65 meters this month. In Olten I also had the technique and, not surprisingly, my result was again over 65 meters. Other than one throw I abandoned, all throws were solid, stabil, and legal. I gradually built up in each round until my best throw arrived on my also attempt. I’ve included a video of that throw below.

I returned from Tuscany on Saturday, but my training camp actually ended only yesterday since I still had a few extra vacation days remaining to focus on training back here in Zurich. Overall the training camp was a success. Above all I have come back to Zurich refreshed with renewed energy to start the core of the season. I have also made definite technical progress, which is more and more difficult as I approach my 30th birthday. As I explained at the start of the camp, my technical goal was to get get more radius after landing on the first turn. Rather than utilizing an early double support phase to patiently push the hammer, I try to force the hammer around and thereby reduce the radius of the implement. I focused on this point entirely for the last two weeks and it seems to have paid off. While the error is still there, my small improvements are now present in nearly every throw rather than just one or two throws each session. And I had a my best results with every implement so far in this training cycle. In the coming weeks I’ll post some more video showing the differences.

Despite the progress, I must say I still don’t quite feel comfortable with the new changes. Well, that isn’t quite right; the throws feel quite easy, but the overall feeling is somehow different. For example when the start goes well I often find myself doing something completely different at the finish. Sometimes it is good, sometimes it is bad. But it is always a different feeling. It is just new territory that I visited in a while and it will take me a while to completely get used to it as I continue to progress with my technique.

Last weekend I travelled to Castellón, Spain for the annual European Cup Winter Throwing. After a mediocre start to the season last week, I was hoping for more in Spain. But it didn’t happen for me this week.

I’ve been searching for a reason why my result was so bad and I still can’t put my finger on it. As a result, I am still quite frustrated two days later. Normally I can point to my technique as the problem, but surprisingly my technique was improved compared to last week and much closer to what I’ve been doing in training. I can point to a dozen things that may have contributed: too much overtime, strong winds, slow competition, tense arms, etc. But even all those points still don’t add up. I threw just 61 meters. Even in bad conditions with little rest I should be able to throw a few meters better. It would be best to forget it all and move on, but as much as I try it is more difficult than normal since I cannot just point to what went wrong. I feel completely exhausted now, but I have two months until the regular season starts. I will keep on the same path with faith that this was just a bad day and everything will line up by then.

Yesterday’s competition, LC Zürich’s second annual winter throwing competition, was a tale of two people: Martin the coach and Martin the athlete.

Martin the coach couldn’t have had a better day. Six of my youth throwers were entered in the competition and all six set personal bests. All six also met their qualification standards for their respective Swiss age-group championships. The group has been throwing the hammer once or twice a week for the past four and a half months. While most competed in other events indoors, this was their first chance to measure their progress in the hammer throw. Each one has reached new bests in training, so I just hoped the competition results would reflect that and motivate them even more as the real season approaches. The next meets for them are not until May and their championships are not until September, so there is plenty of time for improvement. After setting a personal best of nearly 10 meters, I reminded one athlete that this does not happen every day. I have to remind myself that too. Not every day can I see so many of my throwers celebrating a personal best at once.

After training with Peter on Sunday he asked me what my training plan was leading up to my first competitions over the next two weeks. On Saturday my club will be hosting a small throwing meet in Zurich and next week I will be travelling to Spain for the European Cup Winter Throwing event. I told him that I had no special plan; training will continue as normal. “Why compete then?” he asked.

He posed a good question. But I have a better question: “Why not?” I can list a dozen reason why I likely won’t have a good result. Most importantly I plan to do normal training up until and including the day before the competition, I will be throwing alongside six of my youth throwers making it almost impossible to focus on my own throw, I have worked with a coach just a handful of days in the past months, I have not touched a competition weight hammer for more than four weeks, and since we are in the middle of the tax season I’ve been working overtime the past few weeks. But there is still no reason not to compete. My fear of having a bad result next to my name vanished after a few bad seasons in my career. Why not compete?

This is the time of the year when many athletes are posting their New Year’s resolutions. You won’t find that here. I’m not a big person for New Year’s resolutions. For me, the new year starts in October when I begin training. January 1st is in the middle of the year, with months of training behind me and many more months ahead.

I’m also not a big goal person in general. I tend to think that specific goals are mostly needed when you do not know what direction to go. Sure, I want to throw over 70 meters, but writing that down on a piece of paper is not going to help the matter at all. My biggest goal is vague: I want to throw as far as I can. As long as I work my ass off towards that goal, everything else will fall into place. I know what direction I am heading, the question is only how far along that path I will proceed this year. And in many ways that is out of my hands.

Experience is one of the most underrated traits for hammer throwers. You mostly need it when training is going poorly, and at some point that happens for every thrower. My season started off terribly in May and June with marks consistently around just 61 and 62 meters. It was frustrating to hear the officials read off marks that I could have easily achieved six or seven years ago. A few small speed bumps in training set my training down the wrong path and I had to scramble to save the season.

This wasn’t the first time my season had started so poorly. My 2009 season actually started similarly. The difference was that it was the first time things had derailed so badly for me. I essentially threw in the towel and coasted through my last meets knowing that my throw of 61.69 meters was good enough to win the Swiss title. That mark would have been good enough this year and in line with some of my recent meets. But rather than giving up on my season, I used my experience to keep me focused through the turbulent waters. As I often say, five meters can’t disappear in a matter of days; it’s in there somewhere. Lo and behold, I found it this week first at Olten, and then again on Friday at the Swiss championships in Bern. At the same ring where I had thrown just 62.13 meters one month earlier, I was able to throw 66.40 meters for another Swiss title. Now the season looks completely different after having two of my six best results ever in the span of four days.

It is amazing how fast things can change once you start to focus on them. At the start of June I was extremely disappointed with my results at the Swiss Club Championships. I had been coming off of several things that had disrupted my overall rhythm and wrote that the meet was a wake up call for me to focus again. Since then I have made sure to get plenty of rest, stay health, and most importantly make a few technical adjustments. The results yesterday was a new season’s best of 66.50 meters at the Olten Abendmeeting.

I am quite pleased with this result for several reasons. First, it is my third best throw of all-time. Second, I was very consistent with five throws over 65 meters and two throws over 66 meters. Third, this meet put me well ahead of where I was at this time last year. My season’s best at the start of July was 65.61 in 2011 and I did not surpass that until my last meet of the season in August. Not only am I now a meter ahead of that pace, but my season will also be a month longer this year, giving me more time to prepare for a new personal best. And lastly, while my technique is now more stable there is still lots of room for technical improvement.

Let me start with the good news: I’m finally feeling healthy again. My rib has slowly reached a nearly pain free state thanks to help from my massage therapist and physiotherapist. The bad news is that this small problem set me back more than I thought it would.

I assumed I would return to the same level once I felt fit again since I hadn’t missed any training. My first chance to test this theory was on Saturday at the Swiss Club Championships in Bern. Back in 2010, my first year with LC Zürich, our club swept both the men’s and women’s titles for the 20th time in history. But last year was a different story after two clubs in Bern formed a partnership (and flew in some foreign athletes) to move up the podium. Stronger, healthier, and motivated to recapture our titles, LC Zürich kicked some ass this year, easily winning the women’s title and also coming from behind in the last event to win the men’s title. The Zurich hammer throwers placed first and third, tying for the most points by any club in one event at the entire meet.