Practice and Next Season
Hello! Just checking in again. Now that Paris is over we are into the “behind the scenes period” that is the backbone of paralympic training. The excitement is over and it’s time to rack up those training hours. So for the last month that’s what I’ve been doing, logging 2-3 work outs a day 5 days a week. Saber lessons, kettlebells, abs, cardio, hiking, yoga. Trying to advance my skills and conditioning along every axis as fast as possible. Also working a lot to fund the dream and dealing with all those things you never expected, like importing frames from Italy and dealing with customs, and going to fundraisers to talk about the sport and pipeline and make connections. I did get to spar on stage as the main event of the evening which was pretty cool :).
October does have some fun stuff coming up, starting with a small training camp in Vancouver, Washington, then a small competition in Atlanta, Georgia. Then there’s a 5 day break followed by an evaluation camp in Colorado Springs at the Olympic Training Center. It’ll be good to get out of the house a bit and switch from training to sparring :).
We did get our schedule for next season announced and it is looking very fun! We get points for every event we attend and the points have a lot of analysis behind them to figure out which events you will do best at. The official schedule has us going to Italy in November, Brazil in February, Italy in March, Hungary in May, France in May, Poland in July, Korea and Indonesia in September, and Thailand in November.
After discussion with my coaches and some math work we came up with our plan. I am currently getting 2-4 points per competition as people in the bottom 1/3 of the results usually do. I am close to breaking into the middle where I can get 8-12 per competition. So I am going to skip the first few events of the season to continue retraining to beat the middle and top tier guys, because the tactics and strategy to do so are completely different. To win in the bottom you can rely on speed and athleticism, in the middle and top everyone has speed and athleticism and you have to start using feints and multipoint strategies to score points. So I will skip both Italy competitions, and probably Brazil, and return to the circuit in May to go to both competitions in Hungary and France. This also conserves a lot of resources financially and wear and tear on my immune system and brain. Constantly jumping between time zones and climates and being off my diet and training routine wore me down and greatly slowed my progress.
So I am planning on 7 months of training and competitions within the US to reemerge in the middle of next season as someone in the middle of the pack on the way to the front of the pack :). The front of the pack is a whole different game again but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it!
