Continental Cup

I competed in my last meet of the season on Saturday in Split, Croatia at the inaugural IAAF Continental Cup. It was a super neat experience, as being selected for the team was a real honor, and having teammates from other countries was new! I don't speak Spanish, but I was able to help my javelin teammate understand what was going on during the competition; cool.

Croatia itself is beautiful; mountainous land with many, many islands and the gorgeous, clear Adriatic Sea! I didn't take nearly as many pictures as I should have. Mike got some amazing sunset shots.

As for the competition, I was disappointed with my season-ending performance. I couldn't manage anything further than 58.07m; by far my worst meet of the year. I also ended up 6th out of 7. The bottom line is that I simply got tired after two months overseas! My body broke down a little bit, and

I simply couldn't get my mind past the fact that I was achy and sore on the day that I needed to be tough.

I also had a hard time focusing on executing my technique well because I couldn't get past the fact that I didn't feel good physically. Mediocre technique plus decreased confidence in my physical abilities equals worse throwing than I'm used to these days!

I had a meeting with Ty today to talk about next years' strategy, and discussing the future helped me understand what happened at the end of this season. This year, my training was designed to peak at USAs, with a maintenance program that started right afterward. That maintenance program allowed me to last about seven weeks in good shape before the affects of the training I did prior to USAs fully wore off. Seven weeks post-USA Championships put me right at Zurich, which is where things started to decline a little bit!

How cool to know why things happened the way they did,

and to know that we can change plans for next summer in order to be ready to throw far when we want to. Yay! I'm excited to have real focus next year instead of going meet to meet just, you know, seeing how things go. It will be good to have direction.

Overall, this season was amazing for me, and I'm super excited about how far I've come in a year, not to mention the room for improvement that I still see! Thank you endlessly to everyone that has ever offered me an encouraging word or ten, as it always, always helps!! Here are some statistics to compare last year with this one...

2009 average of top 5 competitions: 59.19m
63.95m (USAs)
58.56m (Regionals)
58.41m (ASU Invite)
57.90m (NCAAs)
57.14m (approximation...haha)

2010 average of top 5 competitions: 64.66m
66.67m (USAs)
65.90m (Prefontaine)
64.21m (Monaco)
63.41m (London)
63.11m (Gateshead)

Including all 12 competitions this year, my average was 62.28m. I threw 61.00m at 8 out of 12 competitions this season, or 67% of the time. In 2009, I threw further than 61.00m only once.

I'm extremely excited to have some rest! I fly to Colorado Springs tomorrow morning to hang out with Russ and his family, and we're going to spend lots of time in the great outdoors, yay!!!!