Monday 18 March 2013

Peaks and troughs

Since the last entry, I've been building towards a competition on Sunday 24th March in Birmingham. This will be my first national competition and is a challenge I'm really relishing the thought of. I took my training up to twice a day for 2 weeks, and have slowly started tapering down now. This was a pretty exhausting period, both physically and mentally, and I have to say I'm glad to be coming out the other side of it. Getting up at the crack of dawn to get to the gym by 7.15am every morning to do weights or struggle through warrior pose in my yoga classes was one of the strongest tests of my commitment yet. I also ran in 2 competitions at Newham and Crystal Palace as warm ups for the Middlesex County Championships (MCC's) this last weekend. They provided a really good platform for measuring my improvement, and I'm now starting to see a real consistency to my times in all my races: the last 4 that I've run have seen a miniscule 0.02s cover the spread of performances. At the MCC's, I competed in the 200m on the Saturday and 60m on the Sunday. The standard across the two days gave me yet more evidence of the professionalism and commitment of athletes from across the country, and another indication of the standard that I need to achieve if I'm to reach my goals. Despite clocking a new pb in the 200m, shaving 1.69s off my previous best, I still came third in my heat and 6th overall, and missed out on a place in the final, which was the top 5 athletes competing. On the Sunday, I ran a decent race in the 60m but finished a disappointing last after being absolutely blown away in the fastest heat across the three county championships that were taking place on the day. Whilst I wasn't too disappointed with my own performance, I had been quietly hoping to run another personal best after my achievement the day before, and having missed it by 0.06s, still can't quite decide if I did myself justice. All in all, it has been a gruelling but successful few weeks, and I'm now confident that I'm starting to execute the different stages of my race more effectively. The competition in Birmingham on Sunday will see me compete in the 60m and the 100m for the first time, which means that I get to see where I'm at currently for what I consider to be 'my race'. I'm hoping to hit 10.75s for the 100m this season, and 23.0s for the 200m, and feel confident that I'm currently on track to achieve this. It's taken an astonishing amount of work to get this far, and it seems to be only the tip of the iceberg. I'll be taking a week off from training after Sunday before starting to prepare for the first big race of my outdoor season on April 27th in Uxbridge. If anyone is in London on April 10th or 13th, or in Oxford on the 24th, then drop me a line and I'll send you the details of where you can come to watch me race.

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