The San Diego Chargers’kicker Nate Kaeding and I have two things in common: we are both ugly and we both didn’t perform very well this past weekend. The difference is that Kaeding is a Pro Bowler, and I’m just some jackass.

There were a lot of set backs in the month right before the meet. After hitting 127.5/165 in one training session in early December, I had a programming issue, a training break to travel for Christmas, got sick the next week, and then tweaked something in my shoulder the week before the meet (which I believe was unrelated to lifting). The shoulder issue didn’t seem serious and seemed to hold up Tuesday when I worked up to my openers and Thursday when I worked up to my last warm-up.

I felt it slightly as I warmed up on snatch on Saturday, and opened with what felt like a solid 125 (a meet PR). I don’t remember if I felt my shoulder during the lift, but I could feel it afterwords. Things went down hill from there. I felt pain on my second attempt at 130, and the shoulder seemed to not lock out and I missed it behind. In the warm-up room I could feel pain in my shoulder as I externally rotated with my elbow raised (imitating the snatch). I’m pretty sure that in an attempt to avoid that range of motion I looped the final attempt at 130, sort of racked it yet left the bar out in front, lurched forward to save it only to have my left knee hit the platform (which nulls the lift) and dropped it.

The clean and jerk continued to be disaster. I felt fine on my warm-ups until the last warm-up. It felt like my shoulder couldn’t shrug up to lock the weight over head, and I was lopsided, yet stood up with it. The weight I would fail on for three attempts was 155, 10 kilos below my PR, and something that I easily did earlier in the week. This was weird since I couldn’t actually feel my shoulder hurt like it did in the snatch — it felt like it didn’t work. I proceeded to miss the last two jerks, which was embarrassing.

As much as I don’t want the injury thing to be an excuse, it must have been an issue since it seemed that shoulder did not operate like it normally did. Perhaps it was my lack of experience in lifting with a shoulder issue — I don’t know. I went 1 for 6, didn’t total, thus didn’t win anything (I was the only open 105 kg lifter), didn’t qualify for nationals (287 kg total), and didn’t total 300 kg — which had been my goal for three months. It’s particularly frustrating to train very hard and fail miserably in every aspect.

Thank you to Dutch Lowy, who was handling some of his lifters at the meet. He helped load my bar for me during the warm-ups so I didn’t have to waste any energy.

The good that came out of the meet is that some of our lifters did well. Colton, a 14 year old 77 kg lifter (you may remember his deadlift video a few months back), went 6 for 6 and a 111 kg total after training the lifts for two injury riddled months. Alicia, who joined the gym when I first arrived here, went 5 for 6 with a 85 kg total after I convinced her to do the meet and start learning the lifts 5 weeks ago. Kyle, a 15 year old lifter snatched 75 (meet PR by 5 kilos), and a technicality prevented him from a meet PR 90 kilo clean and jerk (he dropped the bar before the “down” command), and finished with 75/85 for a 160 total (meet PR). My friend Brent, an 85 kg lifter, went 4 for 6 and had meet PR’s of 101/125, and thus a meet PR total at 226. Stef made weight (a chore), totaled, but didn’t have a great meet after barely surviving the bubonic plague that went around Wichita Falls recently.

I got a lot of experience handling lifters at a meet as well as watching Rip do the same. I have a lot of work to do in order to be better prepared for the next meet. First order of business is gaining 15 or 17 pounds…I only weighed in at 100.2 kg (at one point I was 228, down to 220 after being sick, then 224 on the gym scale before leaving for the meet). Despicable.

And for the few of you guys who showed up to watch the meet, I hope you enjoyed yourselves. Sorry if you had wanted to hang out a bit more. I wasn’t delighted by my performance, or lack thereof, and we had to get back to Wichita Falls in a reasonable amount of time.

Rip has said that we plan to have two weightlifting meets at our gym this year: one in the first quarter, and one in the third quarter. Start making plans to lift now. More on this later.