Every month we take a deep dive into the latest research in sports science. This month we start off by looking at research on the performance stages of competition, then look at performance in the heat, genetic test, as well as injury topics related to sleep and hamstrings. Read more
There are two Irish sayings I became intimately familiar with this weekend. Our national javelin coach Terry McHugh, an Irishman himself, first warned us before the competition that if we didn’t like the weather we just had to wait five minutes since it would surely change. The second saying came when we asked a meet official if they thought it would rain on Saturday. He responded by quoting another Irish saying: “You see that hill over there? If you can see it, it will be raining soon. If you can’t see it, it’s already raining.” The conditions this weekend proved that both sayings are more than just jokes.
Ireland provided us with a warm welcome.
The Swiss team travelled to Dublin for the European Team Championships over the weekend. With nations like Hungary and the Czech Republic in our group, I expected a strong hammer competition and based on my season’s best I entered the meet ranked just 10th among the 12 throwers. But our team needed every point it could get to avoid being relegated to a lower division for next years competition and I knew I was capable of climbing up the rankings with a good throw.
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One word to summarize my last month of training would be slow. Progress in distance has been slow. Progress in technique has been slow. And even practice itself is slow as the I’ve had to sludge through a lot of snow. Through the start of the month I was in great shape, but poor weather conditions made it hard to convert that into a good result. Thankfully I finally received a pair of over-shoe snow traction devices now that the snow has finally melted. I also have moved on to a new program and lost my chance to see how far I was really ready to throw. This new program is a transition program aimed at transferring those good results into the slightly heavy 8-kilogram hammer.
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One of the great things about Zürich is that I can throw outside year round. In Kamloops we had to throw indoors, and that left me guessing about how my training was going. Now I know. However, one of the bad things about Zürich is that I can throw outside year round. The wind is really blowing this week which means that practice isn’t always the highlight of my day.
Drawing by Erwin Suvaal
Bondarchuk has a viewpoint on everything, including the wind. Now some of his viewpoints are based on science, some on experience, some on intuition, and some are based on no foundation at all. I used to think his views on the wind were a load of crap.
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