Race Day 27/10/2012

Well I have just completed my 400m Hurdles and i must say I am F******g annoyed with how it went. I prepared as if it was a national final and made sure I was mentally and physically reading. During my warm up the weather was amazing, blue skies and the sun shining down on everyone. Except as the race time approached you could see the clouds starting to roll in, in the background. I knew that the weather would be fine for my race and it would have been if we had been running to schedule. My race was suppose to run at 2.40pm and so i headed out to the track 10mins earlier to get my spikes on and do a few strides before my race. As I arrived on the rack i came to the conclusion that the 800m races were still yet to start, this was not an issue as I knew i could hold my warm up and stay ready by doing strides. As I went to do my first stride out I got stopped by an official and was told that if I was not competing in the 800m I need to leave the competition area, although by this time my race should have already run. As I went to just hide off to the side of the track the same official yelled at me saying that i needed to get behind the fence. So now as I wasn't able complete my strides to keep warm i had to sit through 6 heats of 800m while getting to watch the thunder storm coming rolling in, it was about this time I realised that my perfect conditions to race is were about to change and that i would be running in the rain. Finally once my race was soon to start i was finally allowed back on to the track to try and warm up for my race and as i had antcipated just earlier, the rain truly started to set in the winds had started to pick up. After the final 800m race the 300m hurdlers had completed their race it was finally time to forget about everything that had just happened and get ready to destroy this race. As I got in to my blocks for the start of the race i remember thinking I'm ready. BANG!! The gun went off and so did I, ran 21 strides to the first hurdle and hit it perfectly, 14 strides in to the second hurdle and i was feeling amazing. Next thing i remember thinking is, wait shouldn't their be a hurdle coming up, where is the third hurdle. After having the officials not put out the hurdle I had to keep on running, the damage of this would not be felt until the first hurdle as it threw me off my complete rhythm and caused me to slow in to hurdle 4. This caused me to drop my strides to 15 two hurdles early, what made this worse was the fact that this was right before I was about to run into the headwind. As I was not up to full speed when hit by the head wind, it threw me back and forced me to drop an extra stride of the final bend into the home straight. By this time the race was practically over and i felt like I was just in damage control now and just trying to prevent anything worse happening. My final time was 56.17, 4.17 seconds off what I was hoping to accomplish. Now i knew that this was going to be a tough task going into it but had faith that I should at least get close to it, and after looking at the race I firmly believe had that 3rd hurdle been in place this would be a much different story right now. Also in pure frustration of what had just happened I decided to run the 60m race a little later in the track program. This helps back up that I was running well as I ended up running a 7.27sec into a 1.2mps head wind, which is very good as this was within 0.03secs of my 60m personal best. Any way it's time to move on from this and prepare for the rest of the season, here's hoping it will go much better. Next goal is to continue on training hard and to try and qualify for world university games being held in Russia during June 2013. This should help having my training partner Dan O'Shea racing and hopefully both of us and get our times down under the qualifying mark.

Here is the video of my race.