Junior World Championships 2013

The event that I had been working back from my hip surgery was finally here! I couldn’t believe that I was already at 8 months post-surgery and having my first international competition back. As my last year at the junior level I was really looking forward to this competition. This year we would be competing in Hungary, a country I hadn’t been to yet. The flight over went well and my hip wasn’t feeling too stiff with the long flights. Our hotel was close to a small town square with some beautiful churches, buildings, little shops, and tons of gelato cafes. We got out and walked around when we arrived and had a day to train and acclimate before the competition.

 

For semifinals, I was in the group that had the swimming event was first. My time wasn’t as fast as I had hoped but still had the rest of the competition to work my way up to qualify for finals. I have continued to use the French grip for fencing, which proved to be a little more difficult for a longer fence that was over two hours. My hand and arm got very fatigued and even though I was moving well my reactions weren’t as fast and I didn’t move up any places in the fence. I was in 24^th after the two events and would have to run and shoot well to make finals.

During the warm up my shooting was great and I was feeling good. The last five minutes of warm up I saw that my target wasn’t registering my shots. The technical crew moved me to another target and still it was not working. I started to worry and noticed that my laser in my gun was not firing. I really started to get concerned as the organizers were calling us to the start and my coach and teammates weren’t around. My gun was not working at all and the laser adaptor appeared to be broken.  I was finally able to get my teammates attention to borrow a gun. My teammate’s gun was left handed and I wasn’t able to shoot any shots before the start of the combined. I was already worked up when the race started. The first shooting took me 30 seconds and I hadn’t made up any spots to make finals. I knew I still had three more rounds of shooting and running so kept pushing, but after my second two rounds of shooting and timing out at 50 seconds I knew it was over. I still ran hard, but was so frustrated and angry that my gun had broken right before such an important event.

As my last year at Junior Worlds this was a huge disappointment and a loss of good experience. It was everything I had been working towards throughout my surgery and it was hard to get over. As an athlete there are some things that we cannot control and now I know that I have to be prepared for everything that can be thrown my way. Our failures may not seem like good things, but there is always something to learn and another event or goal to look forward to.

Thankfully my season was not over and I would still be able to compete at Senior World Championships in Taiwan in about a month.