Current items of interest in Track & Field throwing events, and my progress as a Masters Athlete.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Psyched up, or Psyched Out?
In just a little over a week I’ll be competing at the USATF Masters Nationals in Charlotte, NC and I must admit that I’m pretty excited. This will be the biggest meet I’ve participated in to-date, and certainly the one with the strongest competition assembled in one place. 43 current World Champions! 10 Olympians! 1400 entries! It will be interesting to see how I respond.
I’ve wanted to go to this meet for quite a while, but my performances just haven’t been at a level that would justify it. Had I gone to Nationals last year I almost certainly wouldn’t have made the finals in my one and only event, Discus Throw. Last year the top 8 throwers going to the finals wound up throwing beyond my personal record. This year I’m a little better, but quite frankly I’m still on the bubble. A quick survey shows that if everyone posts marks equal to their qualifying throws I’ll wind up around 8th place (OK), or right below 8th (not OK). We have 7 guys who can be fairly certain of being in the finals (44+ meters), I will be one of 4 guys fighting in the 40-41 meter range, and then we have the dreaded “unknown” thrower from Maine, for whom there is no data available.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to “go big” while some of the other throwers choke a little. I’m fairly optimistic because I’ve been very consistent lately, and not only does that provide confidence, but consistency is what one typically sees right before stepping up to the next level.
I’ll be competing in both the Discus and the Hammer at this meet. I have no worries with Discus. I’ve put in so much practice that I know exactly what to expect, and nerves shouldn’t be a problem. Hammer is a different story however. Lately, I have had no idea what to expect when I step into the Hammer ring, and it’s just a little late to gain a lot of experience before this meet. The trick here is to stay relaxed and to not let all of this uncertainty mess with my head.
My Hammer throwing has completely deserted me. At today’s meet I had some decent warm-up throws, and then opened with 2 fouls. My third and final throw was an off-balance “safety” which went nowhere. (Almost literally.) To make matters worse, I re-injured an old calf strain in the process. Having opened with such a lame attempt I knew early in the day that my Weight Pentathlon dreams were over for the day, and likely for the season. Two weeks until Nationals, and I’ve suddenly got a bum leg and no Hammer technique. This is not good.
I limped through the shot put and performed as I usually do, which was about a foot below my goal for the day. I’ve done worse, but the guys I compete against would commit suicide on the spot if they had posted the number that I threw. To make matters worse, the one and only guy that I normally can beat in Shot Put wasn’t at this meet, so I got a big last place.
Discus went a little better. I didn’t make my meet goal here either, but I threw respectably considering my calf problem. I hit 39.91m (130’ 11”) which turns out to be my second best throw ever, and second only to the new PR I threw way back in April. Another bright note on discus was that with the exception of my one foul, the remaining 5 attempts were in a very tight pattern – I would bet that they all landed within a 1 meter circle.
Next up? Rest, rehab the leg, and try to remember how to throw the hammer. I’ve got 13 days to get this done.
In less than 48 hours I will have finished competing in the Texas Master’s Championship and will busily updating my results tables and blog. Only time will tell if the tone of that posting will be “tears” or “cheers”.
As usual, I set my sights high when I began formulating my goals for the meet. My primary goal is to do well in this, my one and only Weight Pentathlon of the season. The goal I have set is to attain the American Standard in the event of 3000 points, and I’ve identified distance targets in each of the 5 throws which result in a WP score of 3001. My secondary goal is to at least do well in the Hammer Throw and Discus Throw, which are the 2 events I have entered in the upcoming National Championships.
With the exception of Javelin and Weight Throw, none of the individual targets represent performances I haven’t already posted at various meets during this season. And my Javelin and Weight Throw targets are marks I can achieve almost every time I practice, so none of the 5 represents uncharted territory for me. The real trick will be to put together 5 solid performances on the same day. (I have acquired a lot of respect for decathletes!)
My PR for the Weight Pentathlon is currently 2546, although I have turned in individual marks on the same day which would have amounted to 2640 points had WP scoring been applied to them. But those marks were last season, and I’ve improved significantly in 4 of the 5 events since then. One big factor will be the weather. The high temperature for Dallas tomorrow is projected to be 106 degrees F (41.1C), then dropping to a “comfortable” 92 degrees (33.3C) on meet day. I certainly hope they know what they are talking about. If not, I could easily see myself starting to head for home around noon, immediately after the discus throw.
For the record, the targets I’ve set to make 3001 points are:
Hammer Throw - 119’ (32.67m), Season best 128’ 7.5” Shot Put - 35’ (10.66m), Season best 36’ 5.5” Discus Throw - 134’ (40.84m), Season best 134’ 11” Javelin Throw - 109’ (33.22m), Season best 107’ 8” Weight Throw - 41’ (12.49m), Season best 37’ 0.5”
One thing I’ve learned over the last several years is that occasional injuries are more or less a given for the masters athlete. I mean, they’re pretty much a given for the younger guys who heal quickly and have expensive rehab facilities, so it should come as no surprise that we older amateurs, who are somewhat more brittle, are going to have to deal with them at least as frequently. Given this, “injury management” becomes a critical component of any masters athlete’s season.
The only reason I bring this up is that I’m entered in 5 events at a track meet tomorrow morning, and I find myself with an injury, so I’m debating my next move. It’s not a real serious injury…I suffered a muscle pull in my left calf while practicing on Monday, and it’s not yet back to 100%. It still feels tender and tight when I walk, so I’m a little apprehensive about what’s going to happen when I try driving off of it with full power and under the load of the various implements.
Tomorrow’s meet is one of the more important meets of the year…at least it’s always been important to me. But next week…just 8 days away…is an even bigger meet. The last thing I want to do is to go to this meet tomorrow and have my performance hampered by the injury, AND injure it even more, AND ruin my changes for next week. On the other hand, I hate to be a wimp about it. Clearly, if tomorrow was the last meet of the year I would be there, but it’s not, and I have the 3 biggest meets of the year coming up – the Texas Masters Championship, the USATF Masters National Championship, and the Texas Senior Olympics State Championship.
I’ve always been the kind of guy who would just keep going until the wheels fell off, at which point I would be terribly depressed about not being able to compete for the month or so it took to mend. But I’m starting to think like the real athletes out there, the ones who make their living at it, the ones who rehab their little injuries so they don’t turn in to season-ending problems. And then when they do come back, they come back strong. Barring a miraculous recovery in the next 20 hours or so, it’s starting to look like I won’t be at the meet tomorrow. I hope this strategy pays off next week.
POST SCRIPT – I woke up Saturday morning feeling pretty good so I decided to make the trip to Austin after all. I limited my participation to Discus and Shot Put though. Javelin was what I was doing when I hurt my calf originally, so I figured that was out, and the wait for the Hammer and Weight Throw looked like it would be 2- 3 hours after the Shot Put. Reasoning that the temperatures would be close to 100 degrees at the start of those events, and that if I left immediately I could be home in an air conditioned house by that time, I passed on waiting and headed for the highway (my mamma didn’t raise no fool!).
Everything worked out well, because I didn’t aggravate my injury, and I got in 4 pretty decent Discus throws (all were within a meter of each other, and the longest was 39.34m). Shot Put was not all that great, but nothing terrible. I take that back – it was terrible, but for me it was fairly typical (10.29m). No matter what happens for the rest of the year, this season has to be viewed as a success. Currently my competition averages for each of the throwing events are very near or are above last season’s best marks.
Last weekend I attended the annual “Cat Spring Grunt” in beautiful Cat Spring, Texas. It was a great event, as always. There were probably around 40 throwers there ranging from beginners all the way up to World Record and National Record holders. It’s all very casual and relaxed at this meet, with the emphasis on having fun. In short – it was great.
My performances weren’t so bad either. In Shot Put, Discus, and Weight Throw I produced the second-longest throws in my relatively short career. Of course, I wanted to do better (I always want a personal record), but it’s tough to be too disappointed with second best performances ever.
My Javelin throwing really stunk up the place though. What made it even worse is that I was throwing with the “big boys”, where my paltry throws were kind of a joke. I should have been at the alternate throwing area with the wimps. Get a load of this – my Javelin throws are only twice as long as my run-up. Now that is bad!
Toward 12:30 or 1:00pm I started feeling weak and dizzy from the heat and humidity, so I packed it up and left before throwing Hammer. It’s just as well because they were throwing Hammer from a wooden platform which I just could not get the feel of during the Weight Throw (very slow surface).
I’ve just got to figure out why I have this problem with the heat, because this is not the first time I’ve had to leave a meet early due to a feeling of impending heat exhaustion. I know I drink plenty of fluids, so it’s got to be something else. I guess I’ll do some research on some of the medication I take on a regular basis (blood pressure, cholesterol, allergy) to see if they might be the cause. Other than that, I will really be careful to avoid any form of caffeine on the day of the meet, and I vow to WEAR A HAT from now on. It’s just stupid to train as hard as I do only to not be able to compete because of the heat. And it’s kind of embarrassing that I seem to be the only one having problems.
Next weekend is the Austin Lion’s Club Track and Field Relays. Always fun, and always hot. This will be a good test of my new heat fighting strategy. (Maybe I’ll get a hat with a little built-in ice bag…hmm, I may be onto something here.)
