This was a fun meet, held at St. Mary's University College in Twickenham. I was looking up directions on how to get there, when I noticed a link to some Open meet they held recently. Out of curiosity, I clicked on it, and was shocked to see the names of UK Olympic team members and other Olympic hopefuls. Mo Farah was listed, as well as Jo Pavey and Stephanie Twell.Upon further investigation, it turned out that this college is home to UK Athletics Endurance Performance Center and the college itself has a lot of sport related courses of study (like sport science, physiology, sport coaching, massage, etc.), so a lot of UK athletes actually study there for their degrees.
The college itself didn't impress me at all, compared to shiny facilities of many US universities. But the track is very nice, with a new surface (although no spectator seating). The weather was perfect, mid 70s and sunny. I had my usual lung pain since earlier in the day and decided to stick with my plan for 200m, javelin and 4x100m relay.
I got unlucky with 6th lane assignment in 200m - the outermost lane on the track, so I had to run away from everyone rather then trying to catch other people. I was pretty happy with how it turned out - I ran 33.64, which is 0.5 sec. off my PR from last year, but is a better result than my 16.6 100m a month earlier. I started tying up the last 50m and couldn't catch a girl that passed me with about 80m to go. She ended up with 32.9.
Then I went to javelin competition. They had only one javelin that was normal 600g weight, and the rest were some specially weighted javelins designed to go over 50m. I figured they are more likely to land flat, and didn't use them, so I had to wait for the one normal one to be retireved by the officials. I managed to somehow foul my first throw! I think it's because I was trying to time my runup to get close to the line, and I looked down rather than up in the direction I was throwing, and that caused the javelin to fall flat. My next 3 throws were each better than the previous one, and on the last one, I got 13m. 74cm (45 feet), which is a PR! I was pretty happy about that as well.
Finally, we ran 4x100m relay. One girl on our team just finished 3000m 5 min. prior to the relay, but she still ran very well. I was the anchor leg, and we did well, beating the only other team in the competition. Our first leg lady opened at least a second gap on the other girl, and we kept it to the end (and didn't drop the baton or got DQd in any other way!).
I got home at 11PM, dead tired, and my lungs aching like crazy, but it was a lot of fun! The next match is in couple of weeks on June 23. | 