This past weekend I traveled to Wilmington, NC, thanks to a competition on instagram called Liftamania. The competition was held by East Coast Gold Weightlifting, Third Pull Apparel and The Everyday Weightlifter Podcast. I was able to attend East Coast Gold’s Senior National Training Camp from Friday evening to Sunday Afternoon at Wilmington Weightlifting Club! I got to meet a lot of new people that are involved in USA Weightlifting with East Coast Gold, most of the people I met were weightlifters much like me some were coaches though, such as Leo Totten, Phil Sabatini, James Tatum, Travis Cooper, Walt Neubauer and others. Some of the awesome people I met were Tom Duer, Olga Pisarskiy, Ashley Freeman, Ernie Premp, Elizabeth Bartlett, Angie Robinet, Adam Beytin, Jillian Marie, Primary Josh and Secondary Josh 😆😆😆, Charles McDonald and sooooo many other seriously it was awesome meeting all of these people and this is just a handful of them!
Friday night started off with a sanctioned weightlifting meet, weigh in was at 4:30pm and I weighed in at 93.87 kg. This was my first meet back as a -94kg lifter, I was excited for that. The plan was to open at 90kg in the snatch and 110kg in the clean and jerk. Warmups felt great and I decided to bump both my openers up 5kg. I ended the meet with going 5 for 6 hitting 3 snatches at 95kg, 100kg and 103kg (a 3kg meet PR), I then clean and jerked 115kg and 120kg (a 5kg meet PR successfully, I was able to clean 125kg with no problems but I mis timed the jerk and that was the end of my session. Overall I was very happy with my performance at the meet with driving 7+ hours just that day, also I made 3 meet PRs across the board making my highest meet total at 223kg which qualifies me for the American Open Series 2 in Valley Forge, PA.
Sunday rolled around and we had two more training sessions left, but first we had a talk from Coach Leo Totten on positive self talk and how it applies to being a weightlifter, he also gave us homework! I plan on doing this homework and I hope to go see him a few times this year as his gym is only about an hour from where I live. I haven’t had a dedicated weightlifting coach for about a year, and I’ve been mainly doing CrossFit to get back to being a -94kg lifter. Though I’ve been thinking about making the move to the -85kg class, as of right now, I’m going to probably stay in between them as the IWF hasn’t released anything final on what the new weight classes will be as of this time.
I’m not sure what I’ll do about the whole coach thing right now as life doesn’t really allow for me to train solely weightlifting at this time, but that’s ok, I think I can still make progress with the limited focused training, I know having more time around the barbell would be better, but right now that’s just not 100% possible for me. Especially as my son gets older and has more things to do I will have less time to do the things I will want to do, but for now we can compromise and work around things. I know I have a ton of room to grow as a person and a weightlifter and I love the time I get to spend with these folks as they are generally some of the nicest and most fun loving people I have ever met. They are passionate about the sport and they want to help it grow by bringing more people into in a positive way.
I look forward to seeing myself grow this year not only as a weightlifter, but also a person, husband and a father. I’m sorry if the post seemed a bit of a jumble, but it’s late and I’m tired from the weekend still. I look forward to seeing you all around sometime soon! In the mean time make weight and eat cake!
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