Still on track

Last Sunday's national champs went almost perfectly as planned for me. The results were 2 gold medals (DYN and DNF), and a new DNF national record. And on top of those performances I'm 100% convinced that there is plenty more where those meters came from. Not bad at all.
I ended up using the following procedure for preparing to this competition:
Preparation

• Last endurance training (spinning) one week before on Sunday
• Monday gym training. I managed to hurt my neck muscles during pull-ups, and had to rest it for a couple of days.
• Light diving on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning
• Eating pasta and salad on Saturday evening
  

Competition day

• Stretching legs, arms and back before breakfast
  
• Eating rye bread and boiled eggs for breakfast (08:30) and only drinking some mineral water since then
• Mentally going through the dives several times before warm-up time trying to associate the dives mental feelings to different parts of the pool in order to be prepared for the fleeting urge to bail out too early
• Going into the pool as soon as the warm-up time started to do some full-lung statics and relaxation on the bottom of the pool; only 1-2 extremely light dives to get the feeling for the technique
• 5-10min break before OT
• I managed to feel slightly cold just before both starts, which was almost optimal.
  
• Diving only to win, not to gain meters in order to conserve strength and to avoid risking SP (my bigger AP:s gave me the benefit of seeing what my competitors had performed)
  

I had assumed that I would need to dive 140 in DYN and 115 in DNF to win the disciplines, but the other competitors proved me seriously wrong by turning from 150m in DYN and doing several hand strokes after 100m in DNF. Luckily I had prepared for that and the ranges I had mentally been prepared for was still higher than these competing results. It's good to see that the level of results in Finland is still high even though Kalle and Jyri were not there to give their best shots.
The DYN dive succeeded very well, and I did not feel lactic acids until 140m. At 160m I didn't feel any compelling urge to abort the dive, but instead chose to stop there to conserve my strength. The DNF dive was more troublesome as I was forced to do 4+4 hand strokes for the first 50m (normally easy 3+3), and after that the 'technique' collapsed completely for 50-75m. I almost bailed out at 80m, but my competitive drive forced me to go on. 75-100m was much easier and at 100m turn I was absolutely sure that I would be able to go to 125m mark if I wanted. Instead I surfaced at 121m to avoid risking SP unnecessarily.
The best dive of the day was still Anders Larsson's 132m DNF, which reinstated him as the Swedish DNF record holder. His technique and balance are close to perfect and it's going to be a hard day's work trying to outperform him in a 50m pool when the turns are few and far between and the differences are based more on technique. Let's just hope that Mikko Pöntinen (Sunday's #2 after only a couple of month's training (?!)) keeps improving the way he's done so far, or that Anders starts competing under Finnish colors...

The complete results of the competition can be found here.

Modifications to the training from now on

• Moving from current 80m standard DYN dives to 100+ turn standard dives. I was able to stay much more relaxed up to the 80m mark now that I've been training them regularly instead of just repeating those boring 50m dives. The 80m dives aren't the least bit challenging any more, so upgrading to 100 dives seem to be the rational next step.
• Actually learning how to dive DNF. Hand stroke efficiency and glide posture would seem to be good starting places... Now my performance has way too much variation, which shows as irregular amount of hand strokes in competition performances.
• More endurance training (running, spinning). I'll need to include more lower-intensity-but-longer-duration exercises to balance the current maximum interval tortures.
• Declining and avoiding ridiculously under-resourced projects at work to avoid being deprived of frequent training routine.