Heather Fell, Olympic modern pentathlete silver medalist, writes about her life 'on and off' the track.

IT was a long and successful sporting Saturday this week. I may have spent over eight hours in a sports hall but for a fencing competition this is a positive sign as it finishes with a direct elimination, I was certainly not expected to last as long as I did which made it more rewarding.

This British open competition was run slightly differently to the normal format with the lower ranked fencers (as a pentathlete I don't enter enough fencing competitions to have a high ranking) arriving early in the morning to compete in pools and one round of eliminations.

I was comfortably through the first round and therefore entered into the next round of pools, which were to be a considerably higher standard with all of the top British fencers included. This second round wasn't quite as successful, winning three and losing three of my fights, which gave me a poor indicator. This meant I had to fence someone of supposedly a higher standard than me in my first direct elimination. However, with nothing to loose it was a close fight all the way with the score at 13-13 (first to 15 wins) with only 12 seconds to go, I think my one hit pentathlon training must have been to my advantage as I won the next two hits and was through to the next round.

My next two fights ended up being against girls I used to train with when I first started fencing in Plymouth, plus who used to continually beat me. By this stage I was just excited to have got so far, with adrenaline and caffeine keeping me going I got the upper hand by just a couple of hits both times and scraped through finding myself in the last eight. I didn't quite make it into the semi-finals losing by only three hits but most importantly I gained a lot of experience and confidence through out the tournament.