“The pentathletes are the perfect athletes, because in their bodies are both strength and speed.”
– Aristotle
I am Martin Gajardo, and I have been doing sports all my life. I started as a swimmer when I was 8 years old and I got into Pentathlon at the age of 16.
Modern Pentathlon has been part of the Olympic Games for over 100 years. The founder of the modern Olympic Games, also pentathlete, founded the first ever modern Olympic Games in 1896, including Pentathlon.
This Olympic discipline is the mix of 5 sports, fencing, swimming, horse riding and running and shooting, the combined event. Starting off with fencing, each athlete has to fence everyone in the competition (final) once and only once with a maximum of one minute. By the end of the first event you will have points depending on how many defeats and victories you had. The second event is swimming, 200mts race. The third event is horse riding, this is a very interesting sport in pentathlon because you don’t get to bring your own horse as many people might think. You have a randomly selected horse from the competition organization, and have 20min to familiarize yourself with the horse before going into the official course which are 12 jumps.
After all of this, finally the last event which is the combined. 3200mts to run and between 800mts there’s a shooting station in which you’ll have to shoot the black spot of the target from a distance of 10mts while trying to shoot as fast as you can.
I know, it sounds crazy, right? You might be thinking, where do all those athletes get the time to train for all of that? And as a pentathlete, I wonder the same. I will tell you about my routine so you can have an idea, I normally swim every morning before coming to class and after class I do my running workout along with shooting. I eat in between of course, otherwise I won’t perform properly during my trainings, and in the evenings, fencing. If you already know how to ride a horse, it becomes something very natural as if you were riding a bike, so you don’t need much training of it unless a competition is coming near.
Now that you know what Pentathlon is all about,do you think is crazy? Would you like to ever try the sport? I personally believe that I have some percentage on me that says I am crazy, at least 5% crazy.
I hope you enjoy reading my first post!
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