Jimisola.com - keepin’ on

I gave myself  a really nice birthday gift when I turned 31 - running a 100m competition at Öresundsspelen in Helsingborg. It was my first competion since Sep 4th 2005 at the Swedish Relay Championships! Actually started the day by taking my mom and two of my siblings for a flight around Scanias (sv Skånes) west coast (Ljungbyhed-Lomma-Malmö-Skanör/Falsterbo-Ringsjön and back). It was their first flight in a small airplane and first flight with me as well.

Anyway, back to track. I’ve been waiting for this moment for quite some time. I had planned to run the Swedish Indoor Championships in Malmö during the winter (my club Malmö AI hosted it and it’s its 100th year anniversary this year). However, I got sick around Christmas and the groin acted out real bad - again.

Then spring came and it has been really hard to train with all the work going on in school with theory and flying. I had periods where I trained really well for 2-3 weeks just to be unable to train for a whole week because of exams and flying. I’ve felt the groin but my body has responded quite good in general to training. Had a good training streak up until a few weeks ago when I cut my foot AGAIN (last time was 2002 on a coral in Hawaii), but this time on a piece of metal in the garden of a friend. I actually had to get stitched and on the same evening that I removed it I managed to bang that same toe into the door post of my bathroom, so it took 2,5 weeks for it to heal. Back into training I had a weight session and managed to get wryneck (sv nackspärr) and another week passed by without training.

Had hoped to have run at Världsungdomsspelen in Gothenburg (did my 100m pb of 10.56 there), but I was out of time. Because I was moving back home to Malmö first thing after the skill test (sv uppflygning) and also visiting friends in Stockholm I simply had to wait for Öresundsspelen (where I have my 200m pb of 21.09).

It was a wonderful feeling to be at a track meet to compete. Really missed that feeling, missed being nervous, missed being pumped up before a race… I was quite nervous before I started warming up even though it was a small meet, so it was probably a good thing that I got there just in time (because of the earlier flight) as it did not give me much time to think. I quickly got into the old warmup routine and, quick as a flash, the winner mentality was back again.

The heat race felt amazingly good. I didn’t feel any pain in my groin and hamstrings etc felt ok. I got out quite well and got relaxed early even though we had a terrible headwind of -3.0 m/s. I won with 11.27. The winners of two of the three other heats had 11.26 and 11.30.

For some reason the meet had almost four hours between heats and final which scared me a bit since I didn’t know if my body would get stiff during that long a wait (bearing in mind that I had been up early flying as well). I had a warm down, ate a little and then slept for an hour or so in my car.

I knew early during the day’s second warm up that my body was ok and it was a huge relief. After the Danish long jumper Morten had a DNS (Did Not Show) it ended up being (in order from inside out) Henrik Olausson, Daniel Persson,  Christoffer Sandin and myself in the middle lanes. The conditions were much better now as the wind had calmed down considerably.

Daniel came to a good start - as usual - with Henrik and Christoffer close behind while I took a too long to get out of the blocks. I felt immediately that I was waaaay behind, stressed it, rose up, totally messed up my acceleration and stiffed up. A bit disappointing about the race in the final, but I knew that the start and acceleration had to be good in order for me to be able to challenge the others. I was still happy though - I had run two 100m without feeling more pain when I left than when I came. That was a good thing if any…

I’m hoping that I’ll be able to run next on Tue 22nd at DN Galan’s National 100m heats prior to the main meet (DN Galan will have a 4×100m relay, so there will be a lot of guys faster than me wanting to run)). If things still feel ok after Stockholm I’ll most likely run at the Swedish Championships Aug 3.