On January 9th, I had an opportunity to represent KAS in a competition to qualify for nationals. Spoiler alert: although I placed 5th in my group in the finals, I was glad to be competing after three months.

Being in the Senior group was definitely more difficult than when I used to compete in Juniors. The standards that judges score you on is drastically raised higher. In local schools, students who excel at certain sports join their schools sports team where they practice daily for long periods of time. Naturally, they would better than people like me who can only go to practice twice a week. I was surprised that I was able to rank just below the three athletes from the best team in the city for the first round. The day of the competition was around 10°C and all I remember thinking about was why the wind was so strong. The cold weather is actually quite dangerous if athletes do not prepare themselves well for it, so I made sure to constantly be warm whether that was through wearing more jackets or warming up for a longer time. Still, I felt that some of kicks were restricted and my stretches were tighter. One of my friends in the Junior group could not continue to compete due to his knee injury, which worsened with the cold temperature. During the finals, I thought that I could have performed much better because I was not as steady as per usual; however, this showed me that the process to achieving a higher rank or improvement requires a lot of time.