Goal checking

Posted by Nell Mead at 10:18 on 8 Jun 2012

How are you getting on with your goals for 2012?  In my February newsletter, I talked about Team Victory's goals for the year.  And today I have a couple of updates, as we girls have completed milestones towards achieving ours.

You may recall that Sarah Franklin's goal was to qualify for the British Powerlifting Championships in the <63kg weight category.  This was actually a dual goal, as she had not only to reduce her bodyweight to weight in under the 63kg maximum, but also to increase her strength in order to perform and lift enough weight at the Powerlifting South East Championships to qualify for the national championships.

And with the help of her support team (including Victory team members Raymond Yong and Phil McDougall, as well as Foundry trainer - and Sarah's boyfriend - Richard Thompson) she did just that!  You can read Sarah and Richard's account of her journey here, and see her in action on YouTube here.  Her next competition is indeed the British Powerlifting Championships, at the end of this month.

My goal was to enter some ITF veterans' tennis tournaments with the aim of picking up some world ranking points.  Accordingly, I've been training hard at Pinner LTC and Connaught LTC, and consulting with Victory's performance psychologist Dr Victor Thompson on mental toughness.  Then I threw myself in at the deep end, entering an ITF Grade I event, the British Veterans' Clay Court Championships at Devonshire Park in Bournemouth.

It's fair to say that I had an unlucky draw: I played the top seed, former world number 134 and British number 2, Karen Cross in the first round.  I couldn't have expected to win: Karen is far more experienced than I am and has trained harder and played far better opposition than I probably ever will.  But as the total underdog, I decided I had nothing to lose, and went out with the words "one point at a time" as my mantra.

To my complete surprise, I won not only the first point, but the first game - to love!  And then the next, and the next.  In fact, I was 3-0, 30-0 up before Karen regrouped and started to play really solidly.  In the end she was too good and won, but I was delighted with how I'd played, and chuffed to have given her a bit of a scare.  I'm still hunting for my first world ranking points though, so my next event will be the South of England Veterans' Championships in August.

So how about you?  What are your goals for 2012 and how are they coming on?  Sarah and I have combined specific event training with support from the Victory team to get started with ours: can we help you too?