Adam Beytin's Weightlifting Page

In my spare time, I train and compete in Olympic weightlifting. Check back here to see my current progress, records, rankings, and blog!

There is a certain discussion people like to engage in that always seems to raise emotions: what is an athlete? At the extremes there are no arguments; there's no uncertainty about pro soccer players, just like there's no uncertainty about couch potatoes. But somewhere in the middle a line is drawn in the sand, separating those worthy of the title "athlete" and those that fall short.

Surely that line is arbitrary, since most can't define exactly where it is or why it's there. An athlete should be engaged in a "sport" at a high enough level, right? But what sports qualify? A weightlifter is an athlete, right? What about a golfer? A pool player? Or a chess player? Is a certain amount of physical prowess required before bestowing the coveted title of athlete?

Not that this will put the question to rest, but I do have a definition for the term "athlete" that highlights some more important components. In my eyes, an athlete is anyone in dedicated training for a sport with intent to compete. The important point is dedication, and it is that which decouples the "athlete" from the "athletic." It is also the point that allows anybody to be an athlete.

On a much stricter level, the same thing distances champions from the rest of the field. We are not all born with the same levels of talent, strength, and speed, but there are fewer people who rank far ahead of the curve than we are willing to believe. It's so easy to look at a winner and think, "I could never be that. That person was lucky to be born so talented." It's easy to assume that Olympians have some magic combination of talent and hand-eye coordination that sets them apart from mere mortals, but that's almost never the case. In reality, dedication is always, always, always more important.

Especially in a sport like weightlifting, the winners are the ones who combine an aptitude for the sport with time, focus, and a relentless pursuit of improvement. These are not just hollow words; a would-be contestant must understand and choose to follow through in order to succeed. Time means hours and hours, every week, often every day or multiple times a day, spent in the gym (or on the field) and spent preparing. You wake up in the morning and you take your vitamins, you eat a healthy breakfast, you drink water, you do whatever you need to do be ready to do whatever it is you will have to do. Maybe you have a morning workout, so you travel, possibly far away, and prepare to turn your mind away from the hassles of your daily life and focus. You spend an hour, two hours, maybe more, pouring your heart out, making every repetition, set, and movement count. You are exhausted, you are in pain, and still you decide every time you lift the bar that you are going to do it right. When you finish, you take your cooldown seriously, doing the exercises you need to do to enhance your core strength or rehab your nagging injury. You stretch, every time, doing more than just going through the motions. Every single thing you do is purposeful and done seriously, without trying to make it go by as fast as possible. When you finish, you ice what needs to be iced, and you make sure you eat and drink to stay healthy and hydrated. You give your body all the tools it needs to recover, because you know recovery is as important as training.

After your workout, maybe you go to work or class. You should have a life outside of training! But instead of going home afterwards, you might go back for another workout. Same routine, focusing completely on every rep. You are prepared because you ate right, stretched, worked on your posture, drank water, etc., all day, even at your job. You can spend another two hours pushing yourself to your limits. You are ready to do everything correctly and without holding back. When it's over, you eat healthy again, and you stretch, stay hydrated, and rest. You sacrifice; perhaps you don't go with your coworkers to McDonalds so you can eat your chicken and broccoli. Perhaps you don't go out drinking late Saturday night or out to dinner every night with your significant other.

And you don't just do this one day and stop because you're tired and your body aches. You do it again the next day, and the day after that. You follow a periodization schedule that has some weeks and months much harder than others. You don't quit or get disappointed when things don't go as planned and you fall short of your expectations. When an injury presents itself, you take the necessary time off, and you also diligently seek the fastest and most effective way to rehabilitate. You take that weakness that hurt you, the area in which your body gave out, and you make it stronger than it ever was so that it instead becomes one of your strengths.

It's not just enough to train hard, either. You must seek out the best, most effective methods of training, you must be willing to work on areas in which you are weak, and you must be unwaveringly committed to perfecting technique. Take the opportunity while you have it; how many people say, "if I only knew then what I know now?" Don't be satisfied with getting something right one time out of ten; learn to do everything correctly and consistently. You don't get infinite chances at competition time, so work the odds in your favor.

All of these things are difficult, and it is no small feat to accomplish them. The major point is that they are all within your power! Do you want to be a champion? This is what it means. You can do it, you just have to choose to do it.

On an entirely unrelated note, Christy is training for her first marathon as part of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Team in Training. While completing a marathon is a major athletic goal of hers, far more importantly she is raising money for cancer research. Her Pop-pop was diagnosed with colon cancer last summer, and though his way of living has been altered, he is currently cancer-free thanks to recent advancements. We are making huge strides (strides, eh?) in cancer medical techniques and technology, but it only happens with the support of people like you and me. Even a small donation makes a bigger difference than you can imagine. Visit her fundraising page for her full story and to make a donation.

Hey, and it's tax deductible!

At Nationals I had a chance to spend time with Mike Walters (our team Hero) who helped work on some of my injuries and nagging issues. Everyone who has worked with him knows the wonders he does and admires his insight into the often obscure root causes of our physical problems. Mike was the one who first taught me that chronic pain can be caused by a muscle tightness or imbalance, usually in a different location. I have stolen several massage techniques from him and used them to great success. But this time Mike pointed out something new and different to me, and it may be more important than I gave it credit for.

I snuck my way into Mike's room minutes after I settled in to Peoria so he could work on me before he got busy. Perhaps it was inspiration, perhaps he had been mulling over it for some time, or maybe something I mentioned to him triggered the thought, but he asked me to stand up and tilt my pelvis upward and pull my shoulder blades backward. He looked astounded at the change, suggesting I looked like an anatomical model. Personally I thought I was pulling a Michael Jackson dance move and trying to entice (or scare) women with my pecs. He asked me to try holding that position all the time while I walked around to strengthen the necessary core muscles.

I would have tried to incorporate this new posture into my lifts, but considering where I was.., well, good luck with that. I did however spend the weekend trying to continually tilt my hips. Back in training, I have attempted to snatch while similarly pulling in the hips. My technique was good. Surprisingly good. I had had five days off, which for me usually means I forget how to lift, and I was still a little stiff from the plane ride. But the technique at 70% intensity was almost like I was a different lifter. The bar ended up in almost exactly the right position, repeatedly, and I caught it at almost exactly the right height. I wasn't even starting from the floor; I was in the high box position or below the knees. Could it be the hips that made the difference?

The phenomenon I am fixing is known as excessive anterior pelvic tilt (http://www.mindandmuscle.net/node/286, http://nealhallinan.com/blog/strengthtraining/the-hip-flexors-and-anterior-pelvic-tilt/, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vKDBmI7McM). It's a normal situation, though not healthy. For many of us who spend a large portion of the day sitting at a desk, including myself, this can be associated with a bit of laziness in the lower abdominals. Besides the many functional issues it can cause, it also makes your belly look bigger, so it must be important to address!

When it comes to Olympic lifting, core strength is paramount. Any weakness leads to a loss of power transfer from the legs to the bar. I happen to have a lot of leg strength but haven't yet been able to match my platform lifts to my theoretical potential. At first technique was the obvious issue, but I am getting to the point where my technique can't be the only limiting factor. Will this make a big difference? Might it also help increase my squats, where core strength also plays an important role? Maybe. But think about this for yourself: chances are, if you're reading this, you have excessive APT too.

It's over, already. Another bronze medal total and my first national silver medal in the clean and jerk. My points helped contribute to another East Coast Gold national title. I'm already home and back at work, back to the everyday routine. What was last week an all-consuming, looming culmination of three years of training is now just a memory, gone forever with only a couple of small pieces of metal on string to prove I was there.

I suppose I might look at it differently if I had met my own expectations. I'm sure my teammate and buddy Phil Sabatini has a different perspective, a man who swept his weight class, made almost every lift, and set all-time personal bests, fresh off of a fourth-place Pan American berth. He'll still be happy, excited, and basking in the glow before getting back into it and preparing to join the world team in September.

I on the other hand feel like I have twice now missed a golden opportunity. I made only three of my six lifts, with only an opening snatch at 118kg and my last two clean and jerks at 147kg and 150kg. I knew I could have done close to 130kg and 160kg, and while that's not enough for the world team, it's not far off. I haven't totaled below 270kg since 2009, and I thought I was a better lifter than that.

The funny thing is I placed as well as I should have hoped. I would have needed a significant PR to place in the snatch, and 30kg more to upgrade my clean and jerk medal. While I was within easy reach of the overall silver, based on the start list I was lucky to medal at all. This was an incomparably tougher and deeper weight class than last year, and I came home with more hardware amidst the heavy competition. I earned a clean and jerk spot on the podium, receiving only an upgrade when Mike Cerbus bombed.

But as is clearly a pattern with me, I'm never happy if I don't live up to my own potential. My prior two meets were six for six outings, with totals at 280kg or above with weights that didn't feel all that heavy. I knew I was strong enough to beat that, and maybe I wouldn't have been happy with much less. Back injury be damned, I've still snatched more weight in training, and I didn't miss any lift here because it was "too heavy." I wanted to see a 290kg total with PR snatches and clean and jerks. Making only three lifts and totaling 14kg under my best feels like I'm backsliding.

But that's stupid. I can beat myself up for not having a good meet. I can be disappointed because there seemed to be no good reason I missed snatching 121kg twice and because missing my opening clean had me fighting just to stay in the medal hunt, let alone the meet. But I think it hurts most because I tried to do my best and still I came up short, and I'm not 100% sure I know why. Is it the weight cutting? I thought I solved that, but maybe I screwed it up this time. Is it nerves I never knew I had?

I look at all this in the context of my goals. I said going into this meet that it's only a stepping stone in my career hopes, not the endpoint. What's the purpose of competing in Nationals if you're not ready to qualify for the world team? I was there to gain experience and to get better, if not to get a little glory on the way. I can't deny I learned from it, and adding to my tiny National medal collection will certainly begin to cement my place in the upper spheres of the sport. Heck, I even got my name in the Peoria paper as a "professional" weightlifter.

More importantly, I shouldn't let this detract from my vision of my international qualification timeline. Yeah, I missed my 121kg snatches, but they all felt light, as if 130kg and more was possible if only I had more solid technique. Yeah, I only clean and jerked 150kg, but the way things have been going it feels like the sky's the limit. There's a very, very good reason I shouldn't have hoped for much more, and that's because my training was thrown waaaaaay off from that back injury. I had over a week of nothing but rehab, and much longer before I got used to the same weights again. I nearly overtrained in a last-ditch attempt to get the technique back that slips so fast in my time off, and my back is still not fully healed. I'm still not ready to back squat again; who knows how badly that affects things.

So it's back to the grindstone again. It's time to refine my technique and repeat it, over and over, until it's always the same, like Olympian Natalie Burgener whom I watched easily win the prior session. I will continue to strengthen all the areas necessary in order to bump up the lifts towards my theoretical potential. I will continue to compete and get better and smarter until I am the guy everyone admires for his poise and competence under pressure. I will put myself into position to make those international teams, and while I may not do it in a meet this year, I WILL have that capability to do 300kg+ by the end of 2010. I won't let the inexorable march of time and loss of opportunity affect my ability to focus and to continue to strive to surpass my competition. I'm still new, and there's still a lot of space left for me to improve.

Three weeks to go. 150 miles southwest of last year's site and 800 miles west of my home, Senior Nationals will begin on Friday, June 11th in Peoria, IL. Registration is confirmed and flight is booked. One hundred and sixty people have thrown their hats into the ring, including twenty in the 77kg class.

It's a big change from last year's Nationals, my first, when only six people entered my class and two bombed out, giving me a very lucky bronze medal. Even with only six people I was in the B session back then. This year? I'm tied for the fourth-highest entry total and am in the top quarter of a class populated by nearly all of the best active lifters (if I'm not in the A session I will eat my hat). All the medal winners from last year's AO are here: Chad Vaughn, Mike Cerbus, and Chris Heinig. Lance Frye, my teammate and 2008 Nationals and AO champion, is on the list. Somehow 77s are once again the toughest class, with the top three entry totals higher than the corresponding top three 85 totals and with six more lifters than the next largest class.

What about me? I've been training, trying to get as much in as I can for this meet in the hopes that I can bring home another medal. It wouldn't be easy regardless, but my friendly little neck injury has come back to bite me. The pain never completely disappeared, though I was able to back squat as heavy as I wanted... until the muscles gave out and I strained a whole group of muscles along the top of my thoracic spine. I had to take even more time off than last time, which once again is wreaking havoc on the peaking cycle I'm supposed to do leading into the meet. All I could wish for once again is more time!

I still hate being injured, but I am taking a fanatical approach to getting better. The very next day after getting hurt I saw my doctor who prescribed muscle relaxers and physical therapy. I was already icing throughout the day and taking as many anti-inflammatories (naproxen sodium in this case) as I thought was safe. The next Monday I was in PT, asking the therapist what I could do to speed up the healing as much as possible with the long-term goal of being even healthier than before I was injured. I don't think he quite realized how serious I was at first - I guess most patients do the minimum to get by - so I had to press him before he said I shouldn't do the exercises any more than twice per day. I have been going to sessions three times a week as soon as the clinic opens at 7am and doing exercises and stretches at work and at home, even close to midnight in Christy's apartment gym.

Now I've done my fair share of physical therapy in the last few years, ever since I first hurt my shoulder in 2004. I have seen many people with very similar injuries, and too many times they resign themselves to the pain and decide that it's permanent. I have sympathy for anyone who is injured; we all encounter hardships, some of us worse than others. It's not necessarily our fault, and even if it is it doesn't mean we deserve it. I don't, however, have sympathy for anyone who doesn't choose to work at getting better. It may be difficult, but what do you have to lose? You CAN get better, and you may be able to do it faster. I was told sprains like this can take 4-5 weeks before getting back to regular activity, but I was snatching again in under two weeks. There is never a good time for excuses; assume you must get better, and then just go and do it! It's not much different than regular training.

So now it's over three weeks since I got hurt, and I'm back into the regular routine, minus back squats. My therapist says our work is nearly done. I'm doing everything I can to be prepared for the meet, including dropping weight slowly while getting back into the swing of high-intensity workouts. I am on a mission, and I WILL do well at Nationals. Will I come away with a medal? Well.., let's just say I wouldn't want to call anybody out ;-).

In the last blog post I talked about going six for six with major PRs at a local meet. It's not the first time that I hit a big PR total: in May 2008 I made an 8kg PR snatch en route to a 10kg PR total (the meet before was already a major PR). I was then unable to match that snatch or that total until the following year. I think it's fair to say that I wasn't really a "257kg lifter" back then, even though I did it once.

Now, two weeks after my perfect 282kg meet, I competed in the Arnold Championships again. Six for six, 280kg total. Two meets with 280kg or more in a row. No matter that I was cut all the way down to 77kg, and no matter that it was on a national stage. No matter that I had food poisoning for two days and couldn't sleep up until the day before the meet. We even held back on the last lifts when we could have gone for PRs. A fluke?? I think this time I really am as good a lifter as the meet numbers suggest.

This means quite a lot in terms of my development. There are now only about five or so other active 77kg lifters in the U.S. that can reasonably do 280kg or more. Unless they all show up, chances are that I will come away with medals from every major national meet I compete in - even with the gold and silver medalists competing from last year's American Open I still took third place at the Arnold. I am very much within striking distance of 290kg even without improvement, and I still have the entire year to train. It looks like I may have a legitimate chance at qualifying for international competition by early next year. All I need to do is train!

On a separate note, I'd like to go into the details of the meet and why it seems I did so much better than last year. For sure I am a stronger and more consistent lifter, but I also addressed all of the major issues that made the 2009 Arnold so disappointing for me. The meet was still a big hurry-up-and-wait situation because so many athletes in the session had similar starting totals. That means that only a few people need to change their weights and all of the sudden it's your lift, yet if a couple people miss then you may have to wait several more minutes. Last year I got really tired because I did so many warmups in the back, especially because I had lots of time between attempts. This year we organized the warmups so that I only did six sets instead of nine during the snatch (40/65/85/100/110/115), and I waited less time between warmups so I didn't have to start as early. I have trained waiting longer between lifts as well, so when I had to wait for eight or more people to go between attempts I only had to do a single warmup, and not necessarily with heavy weight. The meet was consequently less stressful and I didn't have to do twice as much work to stay warm.

The other major issue that I fixed was the weight cutting. I didn't even give it credit last year. I still cut nine or ten pounds in the prior two weeks, but this time I controlled my electrolytes aggressively throughout the final hours while sweating off weight. As a result my snatch technique was consistent and no dizziness on my cleans! I even focused better on the platform, with only a couple really important things to think about.

The result of all this is that I pulled ahead of much of my old competition. Trique Meininger, who beat me at the American Open by 1kg, had the next highest total in my class at 263kg. Oleg Danilov, who would have taken my bronze at Nationals if he hadn't bombed his jerks, totaled only 268kg at 81kg bodyweight and looked happy to be able to do it. Others I aspired to match aren't even on my radar anymore. Leo is already dreaming even bigger numbers (and so am I), so now it's time to get to it!

I said it would be a breakout year, and it's happening! I'm fixing what needs to be fixed, and the results are already coming in. Yesterday I lifted in Mike McKenna's meet, the Vision Fitness Open (aka: "Garage Ink"), a relatively small but surprisingly well-attended meet with impressive lifting for a local competition. I entered the "Invitational" division, which means I paid double the entry fee for a chance to win cash prizes. Ten of us in all different weight classes competed, and while my own class was not competitive (I still got a HUGE medal, 4.5" diameter and 3/4" thick!), it was a real battle for the money, with Rick Bucinell at 105kg+ snatching 150kg, and Derek Fry at 94kg opening at or above my meet PRs. For the Open division prizes we were ranked based on our percentage of the American records for our weight classes, a tough break for Rick being a Masters lifter but having to use Shane Hamman's huge numbers, and for me purposefully not dropping all the way to 77kg (78.6kg!) but still having to use Kendrick Farris's total. In the end we were all pretty close, but Derek took the top prize, I took second, and Rick took home both the third Open prize AND some Masters money.

For me, specifically, I had a spectacular meet. In an incredibly rare feat for me (only three times so far in nearly three years) I made all my lifts, going six for six with an all-time personal best snatch of 126kg, an all-time best matching clean and jerk of 156kg, and a 10kg total PR of 282kg! That's 19kg more than I did at the American Open 2.5 months ago, enough for third place! The lifts were easily the best technically I have ever done at that amount of weight, and even so I can still identify areas where I can improve so I could do even more.

The high total, technical efficiency, and PRs were all great, but they weren't my real breakthrough this meet. I already knew I could lift that much, and my technique has been steadily becoming better. I even use higher maximums for my percentages in training than I did at this meet because I know I can do them; my workouts usually are given in percentages of maximums and I calculate the weights from that, ie: 80% clean and jerks of a 160kg max would be 128kg.

The real breakthrough was, believe it or not, in weight-cutting technique. I did cut weight, cutting back on water and sweating off weight to get to within at least 2kg of my weight class. I have been frustrated for a long time now with having trouble with faltering technique and dizziness at big meets. Even though I have been making weight for years, it's hard to tell how it affects you - in wrestling, it seems you always feel like crap! I didn't even pinpoint the weight loss as the problem until talking with Mike Walters and Rich Harris, whose wife is a nutritionist, when I did a small exhibition for them at Mike's place in Mechanicsburg, PA. Rich's wife pointed out that the two hours between weigh-ins and lifting is not enough time for the body to correct its electrolyte balance, regardless of what you eat and drink. This time I constantly drank small amounts of milk, Pedialyte, and lite salt even while I was sweating off the weight. It's a little strange, because you're ingesting weight even while actively losing it. I made sure I drank more and more, even when I didn't feel like I needed it or wanted it, sprinkling salt directly into my mouth and chasing it with very small mouthfuls of liquid, continuing to do so even throughout the actual competition. My mood was much, much better, and I didn't have ANY dizziness issues this time! I probably had more leeway to sweat off weight, and it makes sense then to try and come in lighter than the weight class, especially when considering ties or best lifter competition.

It's hard to make predictions for any meet, so I can't say much about the Arnold Championships in two weeks. Though technically this is also the Pan American qualifier, I am not in a position to make the team this year. It's also highly unlikely that I will go six for six again, so a 280kg+ total is probably not in the cards, but if I prepare as well then I should see some solid numbers. If I make my openers and then the subsequent lifts then that will put me in position to try for PRs. It's tough to hit PRs multiple meets in a row, and doing so would put my "potential" even higher, inching me even closer to that 300kg mark...

In the last entry I had just finished diagnosing my neck injury and was preparing to prepare (heh) for the American Open. It's now two months later, so as usual my perspective has shifted quite a bit.

First, the American Open: 5th place. 263kg total. Beat the two guys who beat me at Nationals, but I barely had anything to do with that (Mike Soha bombed and Dave Boffa went extremely light). 1kg behind 4th place, and except for that was at the top of the major pack of lifters in the largest weight class (19 contenders) including 2x Olympian Chad Vaughn. My first time selected for the A session. In other words, looks pretty good on paper!

Except.., I didn't perform nearly up to my potential. Three for six, missing both openers, and pulling out only 118kg and 145kg. I've snatched 120kg for a double, no misses anywhere, and 145kg is a routine clean and jerk now. I was a total of 18kg under my practice bests. I really didn't expect to see anything less than a 270kg total. So, no, I'm not happy.

But now it's the new year, and I have hung up my 2009 National Team shirt (really!). Besides getting better in general, my major goal is to bring my meet lifts up to the level of my practice lifts. I want to be a serious contender by selection time for the 2011 Pan Americans. To these ends I will be attending more meets this year to find and fix the problems. I will continue to close the ever-narrowing gap between my strength and my technique, and I will seek out and destroy the magic 300kg number!

I am taking it one week at a time, and I make no predictions for individual meets during the year, but expect to see a major jump in my meet totals.. 2007-230kg, 2008-257kg, 2009-272kg, 2010-???!

Front squats have been feeling easy for me. Really easy. Early last week I tested doubles, going to 98% of my previous best 180kg with ease. I followed with 182kg, no problem, and then 185kg where I missed the second rep. I was tired so I stopped there.

Three days later I tested power snatch doubles (one from the high box plus one from below the knees). Beat my best singles for either lift with 97kg, then 101kg, only 3kg below my best double from the floor. All was good, so I moved on to testing back squat doubles.

With back squats, for the first time I didn't feel like it was easy. I took fairly big jumps, but by the time I had 196kg on the bar (only 6% over Monday's front squat) I knew I was probably on my last set. I stood up with the first rep well enough, but as I was finishing that rep I felt/heard a crunching noise on the spine where it was resting and a bit of pain. I waited a moment to see how my body handled it, and it was okay, so I went ahead and did my second rep. I decided that was it for squats.

Like I knew it would, my neck still hurt after that. I was somehow able to do heavy jerk supports without any pain, but after it was over the area just got more and more painful throughout the day. I worked from home the next day so I could lay in bed with it supported. I knew I wouldn't be lifting again for a little while...

It's really hard to deal with injuries. All sorts of things passed through my head with this one: that it wasn't so bad, that it's fractured and I won't be able to prepare for the American Open in five weeks, that maybe I just ended my career. The worst were the flashbacks to the moments when I officially had to declare my collegiate wrestling career was over. I dreaded the same fate, and I know this will be the last sport I ever train for at this level.

I also think I handled this remarkably well so far. Even with the worries, overall I have kept an even keel and not freaked out or gotten despondent. I have taken it one day at a time, and already good news has come back. After seeing the doctor, getting an MRI, and seeing an orthopedist, there seems to be no question that the injury was relatively minor - no damaged vertebrae. I actually have a theory that my bone density is very high compared to most people, considering I have never broken a bone (unless you count the lacrosse stick to the face that broke my tooth in half), and I don't believe my parents have, either.

As for the American Open, I admit that before I couldn't wait for it to come so I could show off how much better my lifts have become. Now I keep wishing I had more time, since I missed my week of very heavy pulls, and my peaking cycle is thrown off by what was essentially a week completely off and probably more before I'm back to normal. Every workout, every exercise, even every rep is precious, and I want to get the most out of them that I can!

On a side note, I was very happy with the way the general diagnostic process went. Mike Walters suggested I get an X-ray, and my doctor instead set me up to do an MRI, just in case (this is a good thing!). The MRI practice was helpful, courteous, and quick. I had all appointments the same or the next day after I called. The only part I was NOT happy with was the orthopedist. The man was interested solely in treating current symptoms and didn't really care about long-term health. He dismissed all the findings in the MRI - minor issues with the discs - as not worth dealing with. When I mentioned one activity where I have pain that might be related, he suggested taking an Advil and heating the area in advance. Sure, that would make it less painful each time, but it would never fix the underlying problem. He didn't care, and probably didn't know, how to do anything about it. When I asked when I would be able to lift normally again, he barely even examined me, and said that the vertebrae were protruding normally (there is obvious swelling). He told me to use pain as a guide, which is correct, but I already knew that. He didn't try very hard to work with me; the most he went out of his way was to offer hooking me up with a physical therapist and to give me a two-page packet describing neck stretches. The most information I got from him that I didn't already know was that the discs bulge inward, which is consistent with the type of positions my neck has been in wrestling, at work, and in my general posture. Worst of all, he was clearly talking down to me, and gave little credence to my concerns, not to mention he explained recovering from basic muscular sprains as if I were a child.

Whew. Glad I got that out of my system. I'll have to call my doctor tomorrow to let her know what I thought of the orthopedist. And don't count on me missing the AO next month! I will be a strong contender this year!

If you are an athlete with Olympic aspirations, you need to visit the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. Period.

You can only train so long, day-in and day-out with your coaches, or alone in your basement as the case may be, before your long-term vision begins to dim and you start to feel like you're just going through the motions. The vast majority of us only dream of reaching Olympic competition - there are no guarantees - and we spend hours and hours, nearly every day, sometimes feeling no closer to our goals than when we started. Inspiration is important, and we need to remind ourselves that we're not busting our asses for nothing.

Enter the Olympic Training Center - even better if you can do it with an ID and a magnetic keycard. Visit the Hall of Fame, walk the Olympic Path, take a tour, even climb Pike's Peak (the wrestlers do all the time!). With 140,000 visitors yearly, the OTC is the face of the US Olympic team. On any given day you can watch the best of the best training and preparing for international competition. Imagine what it's like to be one of these athletes, with access to the best training and recovery facilities, and with the entire country looking up to you.

This past weekend I competed in the Rodger DeGarmo Memorial/World Team Secondary Qualifier at the OTC. Far eclipsing the competition, for me, was the chance to (temporarily) live under the same conditions as the people I am trying to emulate. Free, healthy food at all hours! Visitors on tour gawking at you through windows. Great facilities, equipment, and inspirational statues. Admittedly I'm not as big a fan of dorm-style living as I once was: it's nice to have your own room in your own home. But this is the lifestyle you imagine when you think of Kendrick Farris, Michael Phelps, or Henry Cejudo (who??).

A few personal notes, in the competition I did well in the snatches, going three for three with 114kg/118kg/121kg. That's my highest opening weight yet, plus two meet PRs, and my first perfect snatch session since January. Clean and jerks were not as pretty: I made my opener at 146kg, but missed both attempts at 151kg for technical reasons (tricep touched the knee on the one clean, and a soft catch on the other jerk). Even so, 146kg is my highest opener yet, and 267kg is a PR total in the 77kg weight class - 272kg is my best at 85kg. Not only that, I made my snatches despite significantly varied waiting periods between attempts, and my new total bumped me up to 30th in line for the World Team after the first day of competition.

As always there is more technical work to do, but I am clearly stronger than ever before, and I am still making good progress in training. We didn't really even peak for this meet. My schedule looks relatively open for the next few months, and the American Open is my real target...

In the long-term, like any other sport and even life itself, a lifting career is filled with ups and downs, steps forward and backward. There are times when we abandon our goals when downturns come our way and the valleys obscure our view of the hilltops. There are even times when it feels like we've entered a convergence of valleys and nothing is looking up. In all cases we should beware actions borne of despair, and we must not lose sight of our goals. This isn't to say that we should never switch paths, or that it might be true that we can't achieve what we set out to, but many have bailed on what could have been successful ventures because they were disheartened.

Lifting has been difficult for me the last couple of weeks. I have been tired, my technique feels like it is backsliding, and I'm finding it harder to see myself making the gains I expected even a month ago. Couple that with a bit of a difficult time period in my day-to-day life, which coincidentally could be contributing to lackluster lifting, and it's difficult to keep my head high. Ostensibly I know that this is normal, and that I will find my way to higher ground as long as I keep striving to do what I know is best (or to learn what is best!).

But don't worry about me. I have definitely set a high bar for myself, for sure, but I've always been a person who went and did my own thing, and I don't dedicate myself halfway. A scene from House, perhaps the only TV show I regularly watch, has a doctor telling an air force pilot: "I've known a few people who had dreams. One thing they all had in common was, they got laughed at, and they didn't care." That idea resonates with me, mostly because I am unorthodox in my approach to life, and it's nothing new for others to think I am strange for it. I wouldn't be unusual to stop because I didn't think I could finish, but I'm definitely too stubborn to quit because things aren't always looking up. I have no idea how well I will end up doing in the end, but I can guarantee that WON'T do well if I quit.

As usual, it seems I have just given myself another pep talk. I hope it was insightful!

Friday, July 3rd concluded the week-long ECG annual weightlifting camp in Moorestown, NJ. I and about 29 other weightlifters lifted twice a day, every day starting the day after an opening meet at Fairleigh Dickenson University. For my third time attending, I thought I'd do a quick rehash.

We began with the Garden State Games, where we each got our own coach from a group taking a senior coach course in conjunction with the camp. I think I made it pretty easy on Tyrone, who had me write down my warmup sets since I already knew my plan and essentially had only to help load my weights, let me know how many attempts remained before I went, and decide for me what weights to attempt in competition. He must have done a good job, as I went five for six, snatching 117kg (and ALMOST 121kg) and clean and jerking a PR 155kg for a PR total of 272kg.

The next day started the real work. Sunday through Thursday was the same routine: meet at 9:45am for dynamic warmups, 11:45am for our first lift, and 5:15pm for the second (times varied slightly, and the less advanced lifters had their second lift earlier). Weigh-ins were every day to make sure we were eating and drinking enough: I lost 1.5kg the first day and 0.75kg the second, but managed to gain it back by the end. There was no skimping on the volume during the lifts; if anything, we did more reps with heavier weight each workout than usual. I won't say this even came close to the difficulty of some of the wrestling camps I've gone through, but it was a hefty challenge for body and mind to lift heavy weight with our best technique when our bodies were overtrained and our minds wanted to quit. I did manage a couple of PRs over the week, most notably a 113kg snatch double.

On the last day we had a competition amongst ourselves: the Yankees vs the Rebels. Each Yankee was pitted against a Rebel, with or without handicaps, and our score differences were added together to see which team lost and had to do the Chicken Dance. Even though we were all exhausted, many of us hit PRs and made some hard-fought lifts. Personally, I didn't put up nearly as good numbers as I expected, and I only barely eked out a win over my competitor Jake Rebman. Jake is a young lifter from Lancaster who had a few kilos on me, and I admit I thought I would mop the floor with him. With a few judgement calls not in my favor, Jake power cleaned 132kg and I did 135kg in the first part of competition. Even though it was turned down for dropping below parallel, I did hit 138kg with better technique than any such heavy power clean I've ever done. In the second part, double back squat plus push jerk behind the neck, Jake pulled ahead of me at 140kg when I tried and missed 141kg. We were allowed to continue until we had two misses in a row, so I dropped the weight a tiny bit and made it, and finally passed him by the time he dropped out. At that point, the Rebels and Yankees were trading leads with only two of us Yankees still going against three Rebels. I managed to stay in, picking weights just high enough to take the lead, making a go-ahead 148kg and only one other Yankee (Jesiah) and one Rebel (Ben) remaining. I can't describe how incredible the lifts were that they made, especially Ben (doing double front squats plus split jerks) who looked like he wasn't even going to complete his squats and still managing to make incredible jerks. I tried 150kg (my very, very old PR in this lift) and missed, and then tried and made 149kg, but accidentally split with my back leg and it was turned down. Jesiah saved us with one last, difficult lift, and Ben couldn't keep up.

Now that it's all over, I did learn quite a lot of technique and I my lifting has certainly benefitted. But I'm not surprised to say that the best part of the week was all the people I met/spent time with. First and foremost was coach Joe Hanson from Florida, a Marine Force Recon veteran whom I met at this same camp last year. We roomed together and had quite a few discussions that gave me new ways of looking at familiar things, and he is an excellent coach who seems to rub off on everyone he comes in contact with. Good luck, Joe, especially on your upcoming wedding with your sweetie-pie Dana!

I also met Valerie Walters, a young-un at just 12 years old, who is already showing a lot of heart and dedication in all of the hundred different things she is doing. With new PRs at camp and a lot of potential ahead of her, she could easily be a force to be reckoned with in the sport if she sticks around. I met her 15-year-old brother Jeff, a Junior Olympian with aspirations to compete in the 2016 Olympics. For his age, Jeff is pound-for-pound one of the strongest lifters I have met, and I'd love to be there cheering him on towards his goal. All of the coaches I worked with were great, and I know I challenged them with my relentless need to know why we do things (sorry, Rob!). I hope they all know that I listened to everything they had to say, even if it conflicted with what I thought I already knew.

So it was with "a tinge of sadness" that we left for home when it was all over. Hugs went all around, and I know we're all looking forward to our chance to do it again next year. For me, personally, I'm a little disappointed I didn't hit many big PRs, but I feel better about it knowing how much better a lifter I am now than at this time last year. The next meet will probably be the Roger DeGarmo memorial, which also happens to be the World Team secondary qualifier, and several months later my third American Open... These will be great chances for me to show how far I've really come.

I'm already home, back at work, and I have a bronze medal roughly 3.5" in diameter hanging from my bookshelf.

A bronze medal for a third place finish in my first ever Senior Nationals, the top annual meet in the country? A rare feat, you might say, which is technically true. There is no question I am happy, and the moment I learned I was a bronze-medalist was absolutely incredible, but I still know that my award is more a result of luck than of the incremental progress that led me to my new best total for a national meet of 261kg.

In my last entry I mentioned my very modest goal of making four out of six lifts, which would show a noticeable increase in my ability to handle a meet with many lifters attempting similar weights to my own. I even predicted as low as 260kg with such a performance. It seems I couldn't have guessed better if I had tried - I made exactly four of my six lifts and my total was only 1kg higher than the minimum guess. I lifted in the B session (while there were only six 77kg lifters in the Nationals, there were many more in the Pan Ams), and managed to beat Jonas Westbrook, my only other competition in the session. I made my opening snatch of 111kg, then (predictably?) missed my second attempt of 116kg after a wait of at least ten minutes. I came back and made it easily. Then, while warming up in the clean and jerk, my heart started pounding and I began feeling dizzy after standing up with my cleans, even though my technique was pretty good. Out on the platform I made my first clean at 142kg, and I tried to catch my breath and stave off my dizziness before the jerk, but my arms bent so much that the lift was turned down. I came back and made it, but I clearly didn't have much more in me, so we finished with a successful 145kg.

I left the session happy enough, but disappointed. I really did feel like I could easily have snatched more than 120kg that morning, and I was flustered with the way I felt during the clean and jerks. At this point we've decided it was probably dehydration and an issue with me letting my weight get too high between meets, but I had really wanted to go for a PR of, say, 155kg, and the warmup weights had been as easy, if not easier, than they had ever been. I did meet my minimum, but totaling 15kg less than you felt you could have is not a good feeling. I had guaranteed myself 5th place with not much hope of anything better. So, of course, we went out to eat.

Just to see how it would go for everyone else, and to see some top international lifters in my weight class, I went with my family to watch the 77kg A session. Most did an impressive job, including Ivan Cambar of Cuba, a sixth-place finisher at the 2008 Olympics. All four of my competitors snatched more than I did, and, unlike many big meets I've seen in the past, almost all the lifters made most or all of their snatches. The first surprise came in the clean and jerk, when Oleg Danilov, opening with 145kg to complement his 118kg snatch, missed three attempts in a row and was out. The excitement was tempered a bit when David Boffa made 147kg look like it was made of styrofoam, and when Walter Soha easily made his opener. Both finished well with 268kg and 271kg totals, respectively. It looked like we were going to see a repeat of last year's American Open when Lance Frye opened with 165kg.. and missed his jerk! Then, he missed his second clean, and, in a moment where it seemed everybody's hearts stopped, the unbelievable happened when Lance's final jerk attempt crushed him underneath it and he stormed off the platform. Lance is my teammate, and I felt for him - that could easily have been me the way my first jerk went - but, wonder of all wonders, I was third place! I practically fell forward in my chair in disbelief. Leo found his way up to me to tell me I was needed below, and I found my very first USADA chaperone waiting for me at the door. It's funny how novel the urine collection procedure can be, and I much prefer the victory drug test to the collegiate version of the random drug test I was used to. My brother snapped pictures of me walking back from the test room, but he missed his opportunity to capture me on film walking down the hall proudly carrying my sample over my head.

I am excited about the result, but I feel much tempered with the knowledge that, for one, last year I would only have placed 9th with such a total, and, for two, I had a legitimate shot at first place. It's not even true that I am not consistent at my heaviest weights - most training test days where I hit PRs I tend to miss one or two lifts max, and my successful lift rate at meets is over 70%. But it really is true that I still have further to go before I can compete as well in a national meet as I can in a local meet. Leo hasn't given me a new workout plan yet, but it is my expectation that I will be training taking even larger jumps between attempts (I believe I missed the 116kg snatch because I had gone in the back and taken 100kg and 107kg and that the 9kg difference was too much for me) and waiting for more time.

It's all over, and I'm happy. The next meet is at FDU to start off camp, and then another meet in good old Frederick in August. Maybe we'll see 275+ over the next couple of months...

Two weeks, four days, and fifteen workouts to go before my first ever appearance at the top annual nationwide meet, the Senior National Weightlifting Championships. Today I booked plane tickets. My brother and my parents have already booked, and my other brother and his wife will probably be doing the same anytime now. It looks like ten different people, including Christy, will be taking time off and spending a lot of their free time and money just to watch me lift in person. As always I am eternally grateful for their support, but mostly it boggles my mind that they would deem my "hobby" as important enough to make such an effort. There is little I could say that could express how excited I am to be doing this, and less I could say or do that would reward them appropriately.

In line with my last blog entry (did I mention I feel like a tool for having a "blog?"), patience is hard to come by these days. A couple weeks ago I saw my teammate, Veronica Aguila, qualify at last for the American Open in superstar fashion. Jordan Rosen did the same a couple months earlier. Now they enter the long period between of eternal waiting before they get to enjoy the fruits of their labors. So many things can happen in that time, and hours will be spent imagining what weights might be lifted on the big stage. The same for me, as I qualified months ago - and I THOUGHT I qualified over a year ago!

If you look at my meet totals since last year, they paint an odd picture: 247kg (April '08), 257kg (May '08), 241kg (June '08), 256kg (September '08), 245kg (October '08), 249kg (December '08 at the AO), 263kg (January '09), 258kg (March '09), and 270kg (May '09). It's easy to try to draw conclusions from the numbers alone, but I'll be the first to say that they are deceptive. My 257kg from May last year was a very good meet for me, and probably 7kg more than I deserved. By the end of the year I should have been totaling mid-250s, but I was a victim of my own inconsistency. By January this year, I was very clearly ready to be lifting 260kg or more, and we had played it conservative in that Baltimore meet where I finally qualified, making six for six easy. By the Arnold I was ready to be lifting upper-260s, but I wasn't ready to do it on a national stage. Now, I don't really have a good excuse for not making 270kg. Really.

As always you should take my words regarding myself with a grain of salt, because I am biased by nature. But I think I'm a pretty good judge. In one sense, I would consider anything less than a 270kg total at Nationals a result of a major mistake made on my part. On the other hand, my performance at major meets hasn't yet reached that at local meets, so I have tempered my expectations. Generally I don't like to throw out numbers, but I feel safe saying that my goal at this meet is to make at least four of my lifts. That's all. If things aren't going well that could amount to only 260kg, but I can accept that. Everything else is gravy.

From the training end of things, almost all news is good news. Last week played host to some unexpected PRs, especially a 180kg front squat double and a 108kg power snatch single. I was ready to stop squatting after doing 177kg for a double, but Leo wanted me to try more - my old PR double was 172kg (an 8kg PR!) and my old PR single was only 175kg! The power snatch was even more of a surprise: the test was one power snatch plus one squat snatch (to make sure the squat snatch technique was ingrained in my head). I had been battling with overtraining, so I didn't feel my best, but having fixed a recently re-acquired bad habit, I beat my old PR double by 1kg (which had beaten my old PR single, also by 1kg) with a set of one power plus one squat snatch at 105kg. I again was ready to stop, but Leo had me put 108kg on the bar, and I made that too. It's a 4kg PR in a major lift, and I am pretty sure it is an all-time PR for me, even covering my college days, just like that 140kg power clean from last summer beat my all-time best of 305 pounds.

While Christy has requested that I total a rather high number at Nationals (that I will not name), I expect we will play it relatively safe. That means it is unlikely I will be in position on my third attempts to hit huge PRs, but let's just say I wouldn't be surprised if my final total is in new territory...

If you'll excuse the simile, dealing with waiting is not the strong suit of most lifters I know, very much including myself. Rather than go into detail, let's just say that we lifters aren't exactly the cream in the expression. You can also blame Leo for the poor choice of words in the title for telling us "you can't polish a turd!"

Really, I do have a point to get across. I'm all excited because I just hit some good front and back squat PR triples for the first time since 2007. It's not because I had no room for improvement, rather that we didn't focus on overall strength. And my PRs are more significant than the numbers indicate because I wasn't actually testing and for one reason or another could clearly have done more weight. But I'm still a month out from the next competition and two months out from Nationals. Even Leo seems to be daydreaming about the weights I could potentially do on the platform. Not to mention that my power clean has increased and would likely be even higher if I actually tested it. If you read my post about the numbers game, you'll know I can get rather... verbose about the subject. But Tommy Kono did say that if you can front squat it for a triple (I did 171kg today) you should be able to clean and jerk it. Or something like that.

Anyway, my blog is as good a place as any to vent my frustration with not being patient. My guess is that you know the feeling, so with any luck you'll feel empathy for me!

Yesterday I lifted at the Arnold Weightlifting Championships out in Columbus, Ohio. In a sense it went reasonably well, with a 111kg snatch, 147kg clean and jerk, and a 258kg total for first place in the 77kg weight class. But in reality, my two prospective serious competitors weighed in at 85kg (one of the bombed out and the other totalled higher than I did). I missed my second and third snatches at 117kg and 118kg and missed my final jerk at 152kg. While the clean and jerk would have been a big PR, I was definitely hoping to do much more in the snatch.

Just to point out why I was expecting to do well, the week before last was EXTREMELY productive in terms of personal bests. I tested five different exercises: hit at least one PR in every single one of them and didn't miss a single lift. I back squatted 205kg for a double, power snatched 104kg for a double and an overhead squat, clean and jerked 148kg, snatched 120kg, and power cleaned 141kg plus a push jerk double. I accomplished my major goal at this meet of placing as high as I could in my class, but I didn't make it in the top five overall (with its accompanying monetary award), and I ALWAYS want to make the majority of my lifts.

Because I never could leave a meet without troubleshooting what went wrong, here are the things that I think were issues. First, my warmup sequence was not well-designed for me. I take most of the blame for this, because I made most of the choices or didn't speak up when I thought they should have been different. The standard method is to write down your opening weight and figure out your warmups from heaviest to lightest. For example, we expected to open around 110kg and so we wrote 106kg, 101kg, 95kg, 88kg, 82kg, 75kg, 65kg, and 55kg. You expect to take your biggest weight jumps at the light end and do one lift for every three lifts that the competition does on the platform. For me, however, I don't need that much rest - in fact, I don't do as well if I rest too long, so I have been setting things up so that I lift only after every two attempts. In this meet, though, we stayed with the standard three attempts, and we were also in a rush to begin. But then we ended up going too early, and we had to wait longer between warmups, even repeating the warmup at 88kg. Even worse, people missed a LOT of attempts, which only increased the amount of time I had to wait. Finally, my biggest mistake was not making the weight jumps larger. These days I am used to snatching 60kg, then 72kg, then 84kg, then 90kg-96kg, 101kg-102kg, and 106kg. Instead of taking six or seven warmup sets I took nine. Compounding that was the fact that there was usually a good ten minutes between my platform attempts because everyone was lifting around the same weight, and I also did extra snatches at 105kg and 113kg between my first and second attempts and a snatch pull at 118kg before my third attempt. My shoulders were tired by the time I actually got out there!

I'm still working on focusing better out on the platform, and I cut a little bit more weight than I would have liked (what's 12 pounds in a week anyway?), but I definitely think that the major issues were the choices in warmups and my inability to deal with long rests between attempts. For a big meet like this, it is expected. My choices seem to be either to learn how to lift maximal weight with ten minutes between attempts or to get used to taking reps in between. I also think that we should count on certain people missing some reps, because I believe I am much better at rushing through warmups if we're wrong than at sitting and waiting. In the future, I will make sure I stick with the tried-and-true jumps and with the waiting period I am comfortable with. I'm not sure what I need to do to get used to the long, variable waits between attempts... Maybe I just need more experience in big meets. I have only one more meet, the East Coast Classic in May, before Nationals in June.

On a better note, though, we did make some of those adjustments for the clean and jerk session. We waited longer before warming up, and I took no warmups between platform attempts, even when I had to wait ten minutes. And I made every single clean and all but my last jerk. Once again, did I mention that I haven't yet missed a clean at 145kg or higher? I am now eleven for eleven, all the way up to 152kg!

Yeah, so, in the last couple of blogs I was bitching and moaning about having a bad meet at the AO. In the month and a half following, I worked on some of the various issues we saw, including focus and patience. Yesterday was the Baltimore Open, where my sole purpose was to qualify for Senior Nationals, like I should have done at the AO. I told Leo to get me there and didn't worry at all about the weight on the bar. In the end, I went from a three-for-six outing last time to a six-for-six perfect meet including my sought-after qualification and a full 6kg PR total. Not a bad turn of events!

In the training leading up to this I have felt much more consistent and in control than in the past. It was rather clear I could do more weight than I had been, since usually my training weights are quite a bit lower than in competition (not a bad position to be in, in my opinion). It took three tries, but I snatched 116kg the week before (a 1kg PR, and a 6kg training PR) and clean and jerked 146kg (also a 1kg training PR). My focus, though, was on a 259kg total, since that was the magic number. I figured that, if you counted the 112kg snatch I made before my three attempts at 116kg, then I was only 1kg off the total already. I finally felt confident opening the snatch with higher than 105kg. Leo played the snatches at the meet conservative, and had me do 108kg, 112kg, then 116kg. I didn't ask him his reasoning, but I fully agree it was smart to keep the numbers lower and play it safe, since each snatch I made put me in that much of a better position for the clean and jerks. The clean and jerks were rather conservative, too (138kg/143kg/147kg), but he put me in the perfect place to make what should have been an easy second attempt for the qualifying total. Once I made that, it was a no-brainer to go for a PR. Granted, I made some small technical errors that made those lifts tougher than they should have been; otherwise, I would have wanted to go for 150kg.

Because of the conservatism, I never had the excitement coming in of going for a lofty goal, which would have been a 120kg snatch and a 150kg c&j for a 270kg total. But when all was said and done, I came away with only my second six-for-six meet ever. The last time was actually at the same place, but I had chosen very light snatches because, at the time, I had never successfully squat snatched in a meet before - when the weight got heavy I would revert to power snatches. Not to mention the refs gave me a bit of a gift on my last jerk, which should really have been a press out. Oh, and, did I mention that my total yesterday would have gotten me 2nd place at the AO? Yeah...

Before I go, here are some notes on the issues I worked on in training. First, I widened my feet for the pull from the floor. Sounds minor, I know, but coaches had been pointing out my heels need to stay on the floor longer, and I had been noticing that, on heavy cleans, I often "cheated" by shifting my hips back and getting on my toes. This is bad. Very bad. It causes me to pull early, swing the bar out, and crash the clean on me. It's not really fun having 300+ pounds landing on your neck with force. A similar thing was happening with the snatches, though less obvious. Well, the wider stance makes it easier to keep my heels down and doesn't seem to detract from the pull itself, so I can go heavier and still keep good form. I don't remember ever cleaning that much weight that easily (did I mention that I haven't yet missed a clean at 145kg or higher? I am seven for seven!). And, my snatch at 116kg looked ridiculously easy. The change definitely worked.

The other major issue was focus-related. I have had quite a few discussions with people about what I was doing wrong with my focus and what I could do better, and I never really had good answers. I had a small epiphany while training at home last week, which was to repeat a sequence of cues that would take me through the lifting sequence while addressing my weak points. During the snatch, that was, "Heels first, ease it off the floor, then brush high." This mantra helped me drive out other distractions and keep my body focused on the things that were important. It really worked, especially on the snatches. The only thing I changed at the meet was that I added the phrase "pull the snot out of it" in homage to David Miller. Thanks, Dave!

Leo gave me a book to read at the next workout after the AO. It is called Four Days to Glory, by Mark Kreidler, and it relates the stories of high school wrestlers in Iowa pursuing their fourth state championships and their prospective collegiate futures. I believe he is trying to give me some inspiration, which perhaps I am now lacking after what happened at the meet.

Even though it is story about wrestling, a major part of my identity for the last decade, I am finding it hard to relate. The characters have won just about everything at their level, and a constant theme is that their opponents have lost before they even step on the mat. But it seems to me that my own athletic career is entirely different. Everywhere I have gotten has come from incredibly hard work, and even then it hasn't come easily. One of my college teammates told me I was the hardest worker on the team, but I never earned a starting spot. In high school, I did well in large part because I went to extra practices and off-season tournaments. I even found my way into a couple of area and state rankings, but I never placed in the state tournament (which, by the way is THE metric for most wrestlers, even into and beyond college unless All-America status is earned).

I've seen athletes like the ones in this book. I saw Darian Kess, for example, absolutely tear apart his opponents with effortless-looking takedowns. I saw Brandon Lauer win his third and final state championship after an undefeated high school career, tech-falling (think: slaughter rule) the runner-up. I met and practiced with Mike Faust, ranked first in the country for high school 215 pounders and heavyweights at the time, who didn't give up a single takedown his senior year. And perhaps the most impressive of them all, I watched Kerry McCoy, an Olympic silver medalist and now the head coach at the University of Maryland, wrestling collegiate heavyweights and making them look like little kids. Hell, Lance Frye would have gotten a medal at the AO even if he had lifted three weight classes heavier.

I don't think I'll ever identify with the athletes who seem to just win everything in sight. It's funny, because academically I never had so much trouble (I was valedictorian in high school, after all). I did the necessary work, and when I was interested in a subject I would go further, but for the most part I cruised through everything. Athletics were the opposite, but I had a good enough work ethic that in most sports I could do well. Even so, I look back on my wrestling career mostly with disappointment, though perhaps I could say I did my best. I am weightlifting now because I found out I was good at it. I only hope I can come anywhere near my goals.

There is one thing in the story that I do feel, sometimes acutely, and that is the notion that the drive for success is a lonely one. It has nothing to do with whether or not people support you - the wrestlers in the book have practically the entire state behind them - but rather how the demands of a sport and the necessary work will separate you from even your closest fans. I am incredibly thankful to my girlfriend and my parents and my coaches for trying so hard to be there for me. But no matter what they do, it will always have to be me who trains almost every day of the week, and nobody can lift the weight for me out on the platform. My training has often enough put me at odds with Christy, and while she does her best to help me process events and move forward, it's still up to me to keep on going. And while it seems that my friends all but assume I'll be in London in 2012, I couldn't feel like that was further from the truth. In the end, I will be the one who lifts alone in my basement several times each week, I will be the one on strict diets to get my weight down, and I will be the one standing in a sauna sweating off as much as five pounds to make weight later that morning. Maybe it's the same for the top athletes.

Who am I, then? Am I destined to be a champion lifter? Do people ever see me on a level even close to the athletes I mentioned above? What if I don't accomplish what I set out to do? Am I doing as well as I am because there is a lack of national interest in the sport? Are the setbacks I'm encountering the same that all eventual champions encounter and then overcome? And what if I fail? I don't consider myself a "top athlete," and maybe I never will. Besides, maybe seeing myself as an underdog will be the inspiration I was looking for all along...

First things first, I want to thank everybody who was behind me for this meet. An awful lot of my friends, family, and coworkers sent me words of encouragement and watched me as I lifted. I am very thankful you all were there, and it really does help me and make a difference. I also want to thank my coaches and teammates who set me up as best they could for success (and, of course and as always, Mike Walters, for fixing what's wrong with me). Not to mention, they're really fun to hang out and have a drink with after it's all over!

Alright. This is a really tough one for me. I'm still sorting it out in my head. Many of you probably don't know what a "good performance" would have been for me, or what my expectations were, or whether or not I should be happy with how I did. In a sense, I don't either. I will say that, when the meet was over, I was very disappointed. My expectations were admittedly very high. I watched video of myself afterwards, and I was even more unhappy - because the weight looked so easy!

I absolutely expected to get PR snatches and clean and jerks. When I missed my second snatch attempt at 112kg, I was dumbfounded. Now, I knew that my technique was a little off that day and I was on my toes, but it still should have been easy. After my first attempt at 105kg, I told Leo I was hoping to hit 120kg, and since there was a glut of lifters all attempting weights just over 105kg, we decided to do three more warmup attempts in the back: 100kg, 105kg, and 109kg. I made them all, easily. On the video, it looked like 112kg just flew over my head, but I was even more on my toes on the pull, and it swung back and caught me way out of position. Knowing there was no snatch PR in the cards that day, I tried the same weight again, and though the technique was a little better, it was still not good enough.

I guess it's obvious I was disappointed by now. My coaches were, too - at least as much as I was, it seemed, and they clearly felt that I lacked focus. Ellyn sat me down and tried to talk to me about it, but I'm not so sure, even now, that I really heard her. I tried to figure out as best I could why I made those mistakes and how to fix them for the rest of the session. For the clean and jerks, I spent almost all of my time between warmups and attempts running through the lifts in my head, imagining myself performing them with the correct technique. My warmups in the back were, again, easy, and Leo started me with 137kg, which I did with no problem, though the clean didn't feel nearly as good as my snatches had, or even as good as heavier cleans I did two weeks ago. We put 142kg on the bar (Leo was being conservative now.. I really wanted to try to hit 150kg-155kg on my third attempt), and I cleaned it alright. But, when I stood up with it, the bar rested on my carotid arteries, and when I tried to catch my breath and set up for the jerk, my body started to shake uncontrollably, my mind started to go blank, and I had to drop the bar (the coaches were already out running to catch me). I was alright, and thankfully I didn't seem to be too physically affected by it. Leo must have had some surprising faith in me, because he raised the weight to 144kg for my last attempt. The same thing almost happened on the clean, but this time when I stood up, the bar bounced and I pulled my neck out of the way. It's a good thing I've been training my jerks the way I have been recently, because for the first time in a meet I waited with a heavy weight and let myself really get set before I jerked it, and I was rewarded with a good lift that I would never have made even one month ago.

I suppose I know I should be disappointed, because I know that this total is much lower than my current abilities should have gotten me. Maybe if I were better focused on my snatch technique, I would have at least made 112kg, and would have been better mentally prepared for the clean and jerks. Surprisingly enough, even with a match of my old PRs I would have won a medal. Almost everybody did poorly! My teammate Lance was the only perfect lifter, making all attempts at 135kg/140kg/145kg and 165kg/170kg/174kg. Nobody went five for six, and my other teammate in the session, Chris McGinnis, was one of only two lifters to make four attempts. Five of us went three for six, four went two for six, and Justin Brimhall, who was virtually guaranteed second place, bombed out completely, making only his opening clean and jerk! Perhaps it is interesting to note that the 77kg ECG lifters had a 72% success rate while the rest of the class only had a 42% rate, but I won't go into that. I could blame the intensity and expectations of the meet for the missed lifts, but I know that had nothing to do with my own failures, and it doesn't really matter how the other lifters did if I failed to do what I should have done.

Now I'm in a haze of trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and what I should do differently in the future. All of my coaches feel that I was not focused (that's been the buzzword ever since) and that I was paying too much attention to the crowd. Yeah, I looked around at people and played to them a little when I went out to the platform. I did it because, first, it has been my experience that I lift better when I'm lifting in front of people (note that all my meet PRs are higher than my training PRs), and second because it has also been my experience that I lift better when I'm having fun. Even though I waved to the crowd, I still then focused on the weight, running through the attempt in my head before I actually did it. In the back, I was doing basically the same thing! I'm not trying to contradict my coaches, who always give me crap about thinking too much, but it's just not me to ignore what I think I know about myself. I've tried to talk with them about it, but we didn't get very far. What can I say - they are all more experienced than I am, and they're all of the same mind. But then that would mean that I don't understand what my own reactions have been, and I need to be able to do that before I can accept a new, contradictory explanation.

When all was said and done with the meet, and not a moment too soon, those of us from the team that were still around went out. We ate and drank at a total of three different locations, and it really was good, quality time we shared, poking fun at each other and getting all the leftover nerves and general mishmash out of our systems. I brought my borrowed Rubik's cube, which either Leo or Ellyn (I can't remember! Maybe I drank more than I thought...) suggested I could use during the meets as a tool to focus my concentration. We celebrated Leo's 57th birthday, which was the next day (today!), and I drank and ate more, combined, than I had in months. I thought I did an awesome job cutting weight this time around, so I really didn't want to step on the scale this morning ;-). I'm looking forward to coming home and seeing Christy and commiserating with her a bit. Actually, she'll be commiserating with me, and I'll be celebrating with her, because she will have just finished her second-to-last ever round of law school finals and will badly be in need of a drink. There seems to be room in every training and competition regimen for a drink now and then!

I'm on the plane home, now, long after everyone else has left. Looking forward to the future, I'm still not qualified for Senior Nationals, so it's back to making weight at 77kg again until I do. There is a meet in Baltimore on January 17th that's probably next on my schedule. I'm still not sure how we'll fix everything else. But, we can leave that to rest, and I'll sign off for now.

One of the things that's really cool about this sport compared to wrestling is that it is much more relaxed, at least in my experience. I arrived in Arizona without incident and met Leo, Jackie Licata, and Ellyn Robinson at the airport (almost five hours later...). Everything was a joke to us (ie: "I didn't hit him, I just high-fived his face!") as we piled onto the airport shuttle to a rental car and drove to the hotel/venue. The group was more concerned about eating dinner than about preparations for the competition, but then again I'm the only one who needs to make weight.

To me this is all so much different than what I'm used to. On all of my previous wrestling trips, almost everybody was focused on making weight and, to a much lesser degree, on the competition. People might be joking around on the bus, but we're all just waiting until we can weigh-in and be done with it. I remember very clearly many nights running outside in leftover snow drifts, so tightly wrapped in sweats and other weight-loss garments that I could hardly move, trying as hard as I could to sweat off another half pound or so before bed. I remember waking up before 5am, feeling like I barely slept and feeling so cold because my body wasn't insulating itself well anymore, so I could check my weight before getting on the bus with everyone else who had just checked their weight, and people sucking on ice cubes or sipping on an eighth of a styrofoam cup of hotel coffee. And then, of course, there was the standing around and waiting: a whole bunch of wrestlers from all different teams, in a gym, small wrestling room, or hallway, most guys in line for their scales (one per two weight classes, often) wearing only their boxers, shivering, and looking a bit too much like skeletons. It always seemed like it took hours for the officials to get ready and start the weigh-in/skin-check process, which, thankfully, was pretty quick once it got going. There was a rule that you could check yourself on any of the official scales, so if you were over at first, you could try other lines until you made it (most of us were very, very close, so this happened all the time) or, of course, you could try to sweat/spit/piss/crap/amputate it out before they closed. And then, of course, an hour later was the actual competition!

I admit, your coach can help set or change this tone. There are other teams here where people are going much more crazy over this stuff, which you can see easily enough if you just hang out by the weight-check scale. But I don't think that's the best way to go, unless you have to, because your athletes are not, erm, cooperative. Fortunately I have given Leo The Faith on me. Last year at this meet he had me come down to check my weight an hour before my official weigh-in (which was at 8am, so he wanted me at 7am), against my protestations that I was fine and knew what I was doing. So when I was half a kilo light (and he was half an hour late) he finally relented, and I went to my room to have some dry granola.

Anyway, my weight is coming down and we're all relaxed. I'm making sure I'm on a schedule of going to bed at 10pm or earlier so that I can a full eight hours of sleep and still get up at 6am before my 8am weigh-in on Saturday. I lifted yesterday, with Jackie, Ellyn, and Leo all making jokes the entire time, "testing my focus" as they termed it, since all I did was snatches and clean and jerks up to 75% of my maxes. Leo won't tell me what my opening weights will be, and it's not even worth thinking about it too much. It's no good analyzing everyone else in my weight class, because, hey, they can do what they want, I'm just going to try and lift the most weight I can. In the meantime, I'm just going to relax.

And.. we're back, after some computer trouble and me getting the bright idea that my domain registrar might be offering some free hosting. Since my last blog, I went to lifting camp hosted by East Coast Gold at Joe Delago's Moorestown, NJ gym. I must say it went very well, and my ass was kicked by the end, but my thoughts on it aren't very fresh after four months. I have also lifted in a couple of "non-peak" (aka: practice) meets - one at the York Barbell facility in York, PA, and another at Moorestown, the ECG Gold Cup Challenege. Since they were "non-peak," I didn't bother to cut all the way down to 77kg. Both went pretty well and were learning experiences. At York, I snatched 100kg/105kg/110kg and clean and jerked 138kg/146kg, missing the jerk at 150kg. That's a 5kg PR clean alone, and 146kg was a 1kg PR clean and jerk. I saw two very good lifters best me there - Peter Madow and Tom Tryon. Tom is even more impressive as a Masters lifter, and Pete just ran away with the whole thing. The brute strength of the kid is incredible. At Moorestown, on the other hand, I snatched 103kg/108kg and missed 113kg. I missed my opening jerk at 137kg and made it successfully on my second attempt. Going for broke (hey, why not?) we put 147kg on the bar, which I again cleaned but missed the jerk. So.. I guess it was clear what I'd be working on in training :-P. Finishing ahead of me in the class was Mark Kroll, who totaled 254kg to my 245kg. Interestingly enough, since I was the lightest in the class at around 79kg and he was the heaviest at over 84kg, I won best lifter for the entire 85kg/94kg session!

Some training notes: in the weeks following lifting camp my coaches and I pinpointed an error I had been making during my pulls (though interestingly only when I finished the lifts, not when doing only the pulls). In the explosive pull, I get on my toes early and pull very laterally rather than vertically. The end result is that the bar swings out, my timing gets off, and the bar ends up crashing down on me in the cleans or is too far out of position to catch in the snatch. So for about a month or two I focused on how vertically I was pulling on every pull, which had really great results, especially in the clean. After York it became clear that my jerk needed serious work, so I have since been working to take my time after the cleans and really get set for the jerk, then taking a slower, more controlled dip, and driving more on my heels so I don't lean forward. I have also started the habit of doing a jerk at the end of almost every light set of cleans and simulating just the dip on heavier cleans and front squats. It takes a lot of patience, but it really has helped my mental preparation by consistently preparing to do jerks after all my cleans, even if I don't actually jerk it, and it doesn't tire me out at all. As a result, people who hadn't seen me for awhile have told me that they've never seen me jerk the weight this well.

There's always more, but the big thing right now is the American Open coming up in two weeks. I fly out to Arizona Thursday morning next week, and I'll get a workout in both Thursday and Friday in prep for my session on Saturday morning at 10am MST. I'm almost as focused on making weight as I am on the meet itself. It was fun being an 85kg lifter while it lasted ;-). Wish me luck!