Asda Athletes

Had my last competition of the season yesterday! I didn’t quite manage 70m, but it’s the end of the season, so I wasn’t expecting a personal best.

I’m really happy with how this year has gone; I feel I’ve done better than people expected me to do. I’ve ended up 2nd in the UK (only by 42cm!) and 14th in the world, and I’ve still got next year to go! I’ve got pretty high hopes for 2013 and I’ll be working hard to make sure that I achieve my goals. If everything goes to plan, the next year will be even better than this year! Although, there are a lot of things that could go wrong, so I just need to keep my head down, work hard and make sure that I don’t get injured.

So in summary I hope that I can build upon this year to do some pretty amazing things next year!

My last entry I said I would do another after the World Championships, we’ll now they’ve been and gone. This is a little later than I wanted as I had some troubles logging in, not my internets or Asda’s fault; it was my poor memory of passwords!
I had high hopes for the competition; the qualification was on Friday 13th of July and the final the day after. After some successful warm up throws in the qualification I was pretty confident. Unfortunately it didn’t continue to go as well as I wanted, I got 67m and two no throws, too short for the qualification mark of 72.50m. I still don’t really know what happened; I think there nerves of being at a world championship hit me, but I don’t want to make excuses, in my opinion I should have performed much better.

The competition in general was a high standard though (even for world junior level), so it was always going to be a tough competition, 11 people achieved the automatic qualification, many people threw personal bests and the final was won by Ashraf from Qatar who won by 9 metres with a world junior record of over 85m.

Reflecting on it now I think this is part of what being an athlete is all about, you have to take the good with the bad, and no matter what you know you can do or what you wish you had have done, you have to accept what happened. If it went well then continue to try to better yourself, and if it went bad learn from the mistakes and let it drive you to better performances. It’s what I’m now doing, I know what I could have done better in the competition and preparation for it, and so I won’t make the same mistakes again. I hope this experience has served me well so I perform well at the next major championships I go to (which I hope will be European Juniors in Rieti ITA next year). Although I’m still disappointed by my performance, the experience gained is invaluable and it will push me to bigger and better performances in the future.

I’ll try to keep this blog updated, and let you know about any of the bigger and better performances! Also included in this blog is a pretty nice picture that I found of me competing in Barcelona.

Hello, as you can probably see my names Michael, I throw the hammer, and this is my first blog!

So far it’s been a pretty hectic year; I’ve just finished my first year of a-levels and am now training hard. I had a small competition in Sweden, which unfortunately didn’t go too well. However I’ve now thrown over 73m and I am currently ranked number 1 in the U20’s in the UK.

I threw over 70m for the first time with the 6kg about a month ago, at the Eastern Counties championships, having had 5 poor efforts, I was very relieved to even get a good attempt, but I was ecstatic that it was 72.02m, which was a 3m personal best! A week later I was at the BIG (Bedford International Games) and improved further to 73.34m, which is the throw that has put me number 1.

Again the next week (on the 16th June) I had another good performance at 72.34m, in the English U20 Championships and World Junior Trials to secure my place in the World Junior team, as I won the competition with a throw over 71m (the qualification mark).

I’m feeling pretty good about my throwing of late, I’m in the best form I’ve ever been in; I backed up the three performances this Sunday in a National Junior league, with a throw of 72.36m, which was a new league record. What made me especially happy about this performance is that I wasn’t feeling great at all and I threw my 2nd best ever distance, and making it 4 throws over 72m, 4 weeks in a row.

In the last few days I had confirmation of my selection for the WJC, it’s now 8 days till we fly out and exactly 2 weeks until I compete, I can’t wait for it!

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get any photos or videos apart from a link to the video of the U20 men’s hammer at the world junior trials/English championships.