Random

It is 6:30AM and I am wide awake.  This is a habit of my work hours where even on my days off I wake up at 5:30AM wide awake.  It feels good to be off for the next 3 days and being able to sleep a little longer than I do on my work days.  This weekend I won't be competing and will be using the time to rest up and work on a few technical things before USA's.

Practice yesterday was a little frustrating in most ways but there were some good things I got out of it.  I have to remember that once I was in better throwing shape in college Wednesdays weren't very good throwing days for me and Mondays, which is the day after my hard lifting workout of the week, always seemed to be better.  Since I started back training those days had been reversed until now, where Wednesday I always threw better than I did on Monday.  I see the change as a good thing due to the fact that Mondays are much heavier throwing days and all of my balls went far this week.  Yesterday I felt a little sluggish but nothing to worry about.

For the past few weeks I have developed a problem with letting my ball rise too much on my entry which has attributed to me struggling to throw over 80ft.  If anyone watched me compete the past 2 weeks, you could see that I was throwing the ball into the rafters.  I think the ball went 80ft into the air before it even landed these past two weeks.  The highlight of yesterdays practice is that I think for the most part I fixed that problem.  Coach had me doing a few different things yesterday to try and keep the ball down and I think it helped a lot.  The biggest adjustment though came from when J.C. Lambert started helping me on my entry at the end of practice.  At one point he had the same problem that I am having now and was able to correct it.  He had me try two different things on my entry and the ball started taking off instantly.  I am looking forward to working on this the next few practices before I leave.

One of the great things about training here at SIU is just the overall throwing atmosphere.  Everybody pushes everybody everyday.  I train with two other hammer throwers and they are my legitimate competition every meet, and to make the Olympic team this year.  Yet, if we see each other doing something wrong we help each other, knowing it is only making our competition better.  The best advantage of throwing with them is that every single practice is a competition.  If I am struggling one day and they aren't, I work that much harder to try and beat them every practice, and they do the same.  The training intensity we get from practice is something you can't get from training by yourself.  Also, the fact that we are three different builds of throwers makes things interesting also.  Coach calls us his Ferrari, Mack truck, and Tractor lol.

Today is Thursday so I will be throwing hammer a little later today but before that I will probably go and help Coach Connie out in the office for a few hours.  I'm about to go cook some breakfast and relax a little before I head to the track office so that is all for now.

Thanks for reading.