The Bristol Pole Championships 2011

Well, last weekend was the Bristol Pole Championships which I competed in. I have been training hard for the competition and it has been quite a journey to get there. I have suffered from terrible nerves weeks before hand and on several occasions came really close to pulling out but hung on in there thanks to the encouragement of my friends and pole students and in the end I’m really glad that I did go ahead and compete.

As I said I was training hard , making sure I practiced my combos every time I was on a pole and then as the competition got closer running through the full routine a lot. It was the routine run throughs that really kicked off my nerves. The combos that I was managing to do perfectly every time on their own were all going wrong when put into the routine! I think I actually only managed two successful run-throughs the whole time. The three days before the competition I was struck down with a nasty cold type bug. Luckily it was short lived and by the day of the competition I was feeling a lot better and was no longer relying on lemsip capsules!

On the day itself I was really nervous. There was a problem in my category with the pole being slippery and some of the competitors that were on earlier than me had problems and had to go on again and re-do their routines which wasn’t helping the nerves at all. Eventually it was my turn and luckily the pole was pretty grippy. I didn’t make any major mistakes and was reasonably pleased with how it turned out. Watching my video back I have decided that I really need to work on pointing my toes and that I need to hold the positions for longer. I held my hip hold for what seemed like ages at the time but watching it back that’s actually the only one that I held for the right amount of time so I will be working on those things for future routines.

You can see my performance here –


Robyn from 360 Pole Dancing was defending her title in the competition as she was last year’s winner and I’m pleased to say that she was successful. You can watch her winning performance here –


Before the competition I had said that I was never going to enter another one again but now I’m not so sure! I’ll see how I feel next year!