For the Love of the Sport

The bar stares me in the face. It is cold, rough, and stiff as I place my calloused hands around it. Today I will do the same thing I have done everyday for the past year: snatch and clean & jerk.

I do some box jumps and and a couple double unders to get the blood pumping to my legs. The room is cool, with some chill music playing softly in the background. It’s just another day at the gym.

After stretching and warming up I slide on my high knee socks that will protect my shins from the wrath of the bar, and next my bright red adidas shoes. I tape my thumbs, tighten my wrist wraps, and slather chalk all over my hands. My coach threatens to make me clean the gym, so I put down the chalk bucket and get ready to lift.

Starting with the tens I do a couple quick reps. This is my chance to fix any technical errors before the bar gets heavy. As the weight goes up, I have to get into more of a routine before each lift. I take a sip of water, chalk my hands, shrug my shoulders, and stomp my feet out as if catching an imaginary bar. My hands grip the bar and my back tightens. There is no doubt in my mind that I will make this lift. I raise my head and find a focal point to stare at.

Shoulders tight, back tight, and heels pushing hard against the floor I start to pull the bar. The bar doesn’t want to move, so I add more force. The bar scrapes my shins and out-turned knees on its way up. It gets to my hip crease, and I hesitate a second longer before I begin the second pull under the bar. The bar is motionless; it sits in the air right where I left it.

My feet move out with a bang and I dive under the bar to catch. My chest is parallel with the wall and my shoulders are flexed. The bar is solid in my grip and I will not let it go. As I stand up I let out a breath relief. The bar stays above me a second longer, before I slam it to the ground with a satisfied grin on my face. My coach walks over and gives me a high five before telling me what I need to fix for next time.

The battle continues everyday with that barbell. It never gets lighter, I just get stronger. Some days the bar defeats me and I leave with my head hanging low. Some days I reign victorious, beating my own personal records and doing what I never imagined I could. Either way, every time I walk out of the gym I leave motivated to be better the next day.

Weightlifting is a metaphor for life. The whole point is to overcome obstacles and better yourself in the process. The goal isn’t to know everything, or to be able to lift all the weights in the world; the goal is find your physical and mental limits then to push past them!

It is a lifelong pursuit to become the greatest you can be.

Kicking Out the Numbers

Lately I’ve been feeling burnt out. I told my coach that I wanted to take a couple weeks off to recover and focus on my diet, but what I really wanted to do was walk out of the gym and never come back. I felt defeated, broken down, and disappointed in myself. I had set goals that I thought were completely attainable, but when I fell short I decided that I just wasn’t working hard enough. My back ached, my shoulder throbbed, my knees were sore, and my hands were wrecked; I wanted to work harder, but physically it felt impossible. I was missing lifts that I had been chasing for months. No snatch or clean & jerk PRs for a long time can be slightly depressing for an Olympic Weightlifter. Thats when my coach reminded me how fun weightlifting had been when I first walked through the door.

Remember when you first started Olympic weightlifting? That day when you first walked into a weightlifting class and learned what a snatch was. That time when your biggest worry was making sure your hands were in the right place on the barbell. The days when you never wasted a second thought on how much weight was on the bar, or the person’s next to you. These days were what my coach was referring to.

This made me think back to all the fun that I had putting more weight on the bar simply for the joy of beating myself. One day I could only lift 50 lbs, but the next I could lift 55 lbs. I liked the feeling of being strong. Not the feeling of being stronger than so-and-so or lifting more than so-and-so, but just the feeling of self-satisfaction. This is where the true love of the sport comes in. The day that you start comparing yourself to everyone of a similar age, height, weight, etc., is when you lose the love of the sport. This started after my second weightlifting competition.

I was the youngest female at the very first the meet I ever attended, and this man named Charlie told me I should quit gymnastics and cross country to do weightlifting. I also found out that I qualified for Youth Nationals. I got a big head and convinced myself that I was pretty good at this weightlifting thing. From then on I wanted to do whatever would make me the best weightlifter. I committed 100% to weightlifting. When I registered for Youth Nationals my coach told me not to worry about my competition, as he didn’t know the skill-level of my competitors. We were just going to have fun and hit a PR total. His exact words were

Snatching 54kg at 2013
Youth Nationals

“It’s just you against the bar.”

At Youth Nationals I did pretty well. I hit a PR and missed qualifying for Junior Nationals by two kilos. This gave me an even bigger head. I started watching the results of the girls I competed against. I friended them on facebook, followed them on instagram, and added them on twitter. If someone made a PR, I made it my goal to beat them. By this point I was cluelessly lost in the numbers. I stopped working as hard; because my goal wasn’t to beat myself, it was to beat my competitors. By the third meet I was already knew where I would rank as far as placement. I knew my competitors best numbers before they ever stepped on the platform. This ruins the game. It’s just as bad as having someone give you a bunch of spoilers right before you go see a movie that you’ve been looking forward to.

My coach and I after
Youth Nationals

Even with all the congratulations and impressed expressions I was not satisfied with my performance. I knew that a few of the girls I had lifted against at Youth Nationals were lifting more than me. My training showed little motivation and my numbers stalled. By the time I competed in my fourth meet, which was a high school meet, I wanted to back out the night before. I told myself that weightlifting sucked and I wasn’t very good at it anyway. A couple people commented on how disappointed I looked after my last lift. My parents even jumped to the conclusion that I was tired of weightlifting, and wanted to quit. Well they were right; I was feeling a little bit hopeless.

The day after that meet I continued my usual routine of going to the gym. My coach could tell something was up, and somehow he got me to admit that I wasn’t having fun anymore. Thankfully he is an understanding coach who has been through all this before. He reassured me that it is his job to worry about the numbers, not mine. He told me to stop worrying and just enjoy weightlifting. So I’ve decided to do just that.

I’m officially kicking out the numbers because the only person I want to beat is myself.

Moral of the story: don’t compare yourself to anyone else or it will suck the fun out of life. We all have a unique story of how we got to where we are and how we will get to where we want to be.