Hi there,

So it’s the end of February already, I can not believe how fast this year is sailing by. I quite often find this feeling occurs in my life.

Athletes live in the fast lane; life is fast and the days seem all too short. It is crazy to think this month I have only spent around 10 days in Bath, and wasted 3 long days in airports.

As I mentioned last month, (read it here) I travelled to the mountains in Font Romeu, south France for a gruelling two weeks of altitude training.  I am very sad to say the snow did not come and bless us with the fun of cross-country skiing, so we ran, and ran, and ran... and then a wee bit more running!

We did however attempt to ski on minimal snow but conditions were not really conducive to us amateur skiers. My elbows were glad of the lack of skiing as during our one and only attempt I very impressively fell hard on one of them. (Perhaps I should add that I am very accident prone, luckily never anything serious, just silly little accidents; like falling in a canal last summer when out running...)

Anyway, the training camp in France was great, the whole squad worked very hard, and for me it was a great way of improving my fitness.

After this trip came the exciting part of being an athlete; a competition. Sometimes, especially in winter, I find it’s easy to forget how much fun competing is. When the nights are long and dark, the weather miserable and the training tough you can lose the inspiration.

This is definitely how I felt this winter – though perhaps my injury made the months drag on.

Our first competition of the season was in Cairo, Egypt – a very interesting place to visit. This competition was the first in the World Cup series, there are six in total. It was so great to get back on the circuit and see many of my international friends, whom I definitely missed throughout off season.

Sadly I can not say my overall performance was as exciting as the trip.

I qualified for the final comfortably with promising performances and was feeling quite good about competing in the final. Perhaps I should add that in a semi-final we do not ride, only shoot, fence, swim and run and to qualify you need to finish in the top 18.

The final came, nerves were flying and I was excited to be competing. I began the day with a good shoot; 183 out of 200, this gave me a 4th equal place.

Then the fencing where I scored 952 points, 23 victories and 12 defeats. This result pushed me up to 3rd overall.

Next the swimming; 17.4, a respectable time and only a second slower than my personal best.

After this I was in 2nd equal place, with a comfortable gap to the rest of the field.  Next was riding and this was when disaster struck. The easiest way to explain is that the horse and I were slightly incompatible and had a different idea of what was going to happen.

My idea was to jump the jumps, his was to stop! I battled round the course and scored minimal points. This sadly ended my chances of a medal and after a steady run, I finished 30th place.

But in sport we must take the falls the same as we accept the success. (Think that is easier said than done.)

Now back in Bath, back to some hard training, AGAIN.

With a month to the next world cup I am counting down the days of the chance to redeem myself.

Mhairi

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