Happy New Year. Time to get serious.

Since the last athletics meet, 3 days before Christmas, I maintained my training schedule.  This was one of my key goals, because in previous years, the interruption to training over Christmas caused issues.  I was able to work on sprint endurance, top speed and starts/acceleration, making good progress in all areas.  In addition to normal competitions, I am preparing for the Victorian Country Championships, which are held in 2 weeks on January 22 - 24.

Yesterday (9/1), athletics competition resumed after the short Christmas break.  My troublesome hamstring has been holding up well to training, and I was interested to see how it would go under competition stresses.  Unfortunately, I had a heavy pair of sessions on Tuesday and was still feeling the after effects.  With the Victorian Country championships in 2 weeks, I didn't want to take too many risks.

First event was the 200 metres.  The first 80m felt a bit slow off the mark, but there were no issues and my form was good, so I gave it everything at that point, and reached top speed very quickly.  I was able to maintain top speed for most of the straight and finished with a PB time of 27.47 seconds, 0.81 seconds than my previous PB.

There was a long wait until my next event, the 60m.  Again, the start felt slow, and I didn't get up to top speed.  This was partly due to caution, and I suspect due to the odd timing of the day causing my to mis time and under do my warmup.

My final event was another that I hadn't done for 30 years - the triple jump.  I had two good jumps, with the best being 7.24m.  It's early days, and I need to do a lot of training to get better distance.  As I need to reduce my training volume significantly for the country championships, this might be a good opportunity to focus on the triple jump.

Next week, it's back to the fire brigade track for a regular competition.