The one with the Silver

As usual travelling is always chaos when we rock up as the British Diving team. The night before we stayed in London to catch an early 8am flight to Toronto, when we got to Heathrow we were told to pick up bags in Toronto before flying again to Windsor. With an hour and 25-minute turn around I said to the check in desk "do we have enough time?" In which he replied "Yeaaaahh you have plenty of time!!!" ... We ran out of time.

The plane was slightly delayed landing in Toronto, it took 20 minutes to get off the plane, went through passport control, ran/hobbled through the airport to the baggage collection point, some of the team's bags came 20 minutes later. We had missed the flight to Windsor and three staff along with mine and Tonia's bags were a no show.

We then went through the process of lost baggage, sluggishly walked through security to meet the other half of the team (with bags) and cheered ourselves up with food. The plan was to train when we arrived, due to the delayed flight landing at 4pm and getting to the hotel at 4.45pm I thought we couldn't be training. 15 minutes later, we were out of the hotel and into a bus to the pool, I am getting too old for terrible travel arrangements!!

After a day’s chaotic travel, evening training and slightly broken sleep because of the five-hour time difference, we only had to be up the next morning at 6am for training! Give me a break. Training was terrible but we improved for the afternoon. It's a good job we only moan about poor preparation and don't let it mess with our competition game. Different to the other World Series, our synchro event was in the evening, we felt ready, somehow. We put in our best ever performance, coming away with silver, and just under 2 points behind the Chinese pair!!! It is the best feeling when we put all of our dives together, we got this now, we know what we are doing leading into the World Championships this summer.

I trained well before my individual competition on Sunday; I was ready and up for fighting for a place in the final but it didn't happen how I wanted it to. I tried my best and with everything leading up to individual; bad travel, being on a high on Friday and trying to keep that high all weekend was tiring.

It was great to see Jack win his third 3m title of the World Series, being slightly off in London just showed that everyone has bad days but with a strong head game, it put him right back up there where he belongs.

Windsor is a nice city to compete in, the people are very friendly and every year we get to see baby geese crossing the road. 

Across the river at the diving pool is the USA city of Detroit; it is strange to see another country whilst standing in a different one. 

A couple of birthdays were celebrated while were away, Tonia’s 26^th and Tom’s 21^st! The perfect excuse to eat cake!

Hopefully Mexico will be chilled with a lot of sunshine and success, after my 4.30am alarm goes off.

SB x