I recently started listening to this band, and others like it, more than anything else. The best word I can use to describe this song is epic.
In April 2013, I competed at the national championships of college powerlifting in Killeen, Texas. I did fairly well and had alot of fun.
It somehow took me 19 hours of travel to get from Pennsylvania to Texas. Upon arrival, I went to sleep. The next couple days were spent watching the girls and little guys compete and helping out with handling here and there. Many of my teammates had issues because of the travel and cutting weight, but it was a learning experience for them. I had to cut about 4 lbs to make weight. For some reason, weigh ins took several hours. This lead to me over-cut by about 2.5 lbs which made me quite grumpy because I was hungry. Fortunately for me, I'm good at bloating. Unlike many of my teammates, I was not really affected by the travel or cutting.
The meet was already behind schedule when I started warming up for squat. Nothing profound comes to mind, so warmups must have been fine. Although, I did have a hell of a time getting my suit on after bloating. I opened around 570. I actually had a hard time getting to depth, which doesn't usually happen, but the squat was no problem. 605 was my second attempt. It was more difficult than I would have liked. Instead of my planned third attempt of 635, I took 622. It was a bit of a grind, but not a big problem. After squats, I was sitting somewhere around 8th, I think.
Bench press is kind of my specialty. During my peak, I was pretty concerned about my lack of window between what I could touch and what I could press because both of those numbers were within 5 lbs of 475. Somehow, the day of the meet, I was magically able to touch 450, so I lowered my opener to that. I then hit my second attempt at 475 with no problem. For my third, I called for 490. Had I called for 485, I may have had a better time. After just missing 490, both of my erectors cramped. I must have lay on the ground writhing in pain for about 3 minutes. Nonetheless, I ended up with the highest bench by about 15 lbs.
Between bench attempts, my handlers and I sang Barry White continuously. The other competitors were giving me looks, but it was ok because I was benching a lot more than all of them.
Very much Gatorade and foam rolling happened between bench and deadlift. Once again, warmups were nondescript. The meet was way behind schedule, and we didn't start pulling until around 11pm. I forget what I opened with, but it was easy. My second attempt was 560, and it was somewhat difficult, but not bad. At this point, I was in a battle for third place. Unfortunately, the other dude was a better deadlifter. I missed my third attempt of 590 and ended up with 4th place. It was 1 o'clock in the morning, and I had been 21 for an hour.
My birthday party was at Hooters. Not bad.
All in all, I'm somewhat indifferent about my performance, to be honest. I didn't have the best day of my life, but I didn't do bad. 4th is good, I guess. All that's left to do is to improve and do better next year.
*You can find videos of some of my lifts in my very first blog post, "Intro."
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