Competition day

Six hours of sleep later, I caught the bus to the competition. Using a practice suit from another athlete and a British swim cap, I limped through one of my worst swims. Its been years since I raced without a technical suit, and combined with little sleep and the stress of not knowing if I would even find the basic equipment to compete, the results spoke for themselves.

Next up was fencing. Steffen Gebhardt of Germany lent me his fencing outfit, nice and sweaty from three hours he spent fencing right before me in the other group. Fencing with someone else’s epees presents another challenge. You typically set up all your epees the same, and changing the grip and the blade angle throws your coordination off. For some reason, this didn’t really effect me nearly as much as I expected. Three hours later, I ended fencing with the 12 highest score and was 17th overall.

Finally we came to the run/shoot. This is new for me and would be only my second time attempting the new format. Since Mexico’s World Cup a few weeks ago, I felt like I had made some serious progress and was ready to test my ability and strategy. But I spent more time and energy looking for shorts to wear (I was lucky to have traveled in an old pair of running shoes), than I did thinking about how to execute when the time came. With a borrowed gun of a completely different make than my own, I was surprised to only move back a couple slots after the first shoot series. But the second and third series proved harder. With the higher heart rate from running, the unfamiliarity proved too much and I timed out (70 seconds) twice.

In the end, I think I finished somewhere between 25th and 30th, but I’m not really sure. I think that with my own equipment, it would have been a very different day. This competition ended a two year streak of making every final, so at least I get to blame it on luggage!