A lot of people who go to Olympic weightlifting competitions are not the types of people you would expect to go to Olympic weightlifting competitions. I, for example, am long-limbed and lanky, and do not look like I’m the right shape to do this competitively. Think Gumby, but on the cusp of dad bod.
And yet here I am, on a bleak and rainy Saturday in a small gym in southwestern Pennsylvania, about to sling an iron-laden barbell over my head in front of a room full of strangers. This is not unlike normal gym experiences, except this time, all of the strangers will be staring at me. Also, I am piped into a singlet for the first time in my life. A chalk bucket sits on a table next to the platform, and I plunge my hands in, taking longer than I need to because I’m trying to convince myself that this isn’t a big deal, and also wondering how uncomfortable I look in my singlet.
Up on the platform, I grip the barbell and squat down, rocking myself into position and trying to tighten all the slack out of my body: palm calluses pressed against the rough grip, arms taut from wrist to shoulder, back tight, legs and butt just shy of flexed. The barbell needs to move as soon as I start to rise, or else my legs aren’t going to power it up, which means I’ll have to make the whole movement work with just my arms, which is a great way for me to fall over and fuck how long have I been squatting here, I need to do this.
I pull up and then drop down, shifting my weight to my heels so as not to wobble precariously, and then stand with my elbows completely extended, tight like you’re trying to break the barbell, just like my coaches said. I feel strong and elated and just freaking bouncy as I drop the bar in front of me.
I’m already strutting back to the waiting area, giddy, when I see the combination of sympathy and horror registered on all the onlookers’ faces.
“Good lift,” says the announcer, and everyone unclenches, kind of.
“Okay, so, uh, next time,” says Tom, my coach, “you have to wait for the judge to signal you to drop the bar.”
For years, my fitness routine consisted mostly of casual running, and I even managed to flop my way through a handful of races before a nagging knee condition and a general hatred of running prompted me to give it up. I ended up at Pittsburgh Fitness Project, run by husband and wife Tom and Maggie Duer, after a gym-savvier friend suggested I try Olympic weightlifting instead. He thought I’d get into the weird, obsessive nature of the sport, and every weightlifter he'd met was unrelentingly friendly and awkward, which I begrudgingly accepted as a compliment. (It also wasn’t high-impact enough for a stubborn knee cyst to be an issue.).
I soon found weightlifting to be meditative in a way that running was supposed to be and never was. For all the hours I put into pounding the pavement, I never reached an empty-headed, transcendent clarity you’re supposed to get with a runner’s high. Weightlifting, though, required a clear head to be done right, but only for bursts of a few seconds at a time: Get down there, stop thinking, do it. And since there are only two real moves to learn—the snatch and the clean-and-jerk—you can focus on constantly tweaking and perfecting them basically forever.
The lifters I met were a pleasantly eclectic mix, with none of the insufferable gym-rat-isms I expected from folks who spend a significant chunk of their lives mid-squat. A pretty even split of men and women who would bring in cookies, talk about politics and homemade ice cream flavors, and compare callus scrapers while either Rihanna or cartoons played in the background.
In the snatch, the bar starts on the floor, and you squat down with both feet and hands wide. You press down through your feet, rise until the bar is at your groin, and then pull with your arms and back while leveraging your hips for momentum. As the bar goes up, you drop down, “receiving” it in squat position with your arms straight above your head. Here, allow Olympic gold medalist Oleksiy Torokhtiy, who I assure you bears a remarkable resemblance to me, to demonstrate.
As with the snatch, the point of the clean-and-jerk is to get the bar over your head, but it’s split into two separate moves. The clean gets the bar from the floor onto a shelf you make with your shoulders and chest. You dip at the hips, then launch up and lock out your arms for the jerk. Again, here’s Oleksiy.
The goal is for all these details to become pure muscle memory, because at my gym it’s an oft-repeated mantra that if you’re thinking about it, you’re going to fuck it up. Or, more simply and less profanely, “Trust your butt.” When you don’t trust your butt, suddenly the bar won’t come off the ground or go higher than your chest. Or—worst of all—it “spits you out,” which is when your balance is so screwed up that you get launched butt-first backward. I cannot stress enough how tiny of a fraction of a second that last humiliation happens in.
After four months of training, I started to notice changes to my physique—my shoulders and neck were slightly larger, and there was a real (if faint) V-shape to my back. The main evidence that I was improving, however, was that everything was getting a lot harder. “When you get good,” Tom assured me, “suddenly everything feels heavier, just getting off the floor.”
As I worked my way through the basics, the gym’s other lifters were going to competitions as a group semi-regularly, returning with summer-camp-esque bonding stories and medals to hang on the wall. I didn't ever expect to bring glory to the gym, but the prospect of eating shit in front of a crowd seemed like a good motivator for me to not skip a workout. Around the time I started to feel more confident, I learned there was another competition in three months—plenty of time to prepare, I figured. I signed up and ordered my singlet.
At the Relentless Barbell Club's aptly named Relentless Open, the competition space is arranged like a basement church, with three long rows of folding chairs in a semicircle around a platform. A leaderboard projected onto the wall has several entrants' info by the time I walk up to it: names, teams, weights, and birth years, which together cause me to emit a little groan. Of the three competitors going before me—that is, the only people planning to lift less weight than me in the whole competition—the oldest was born in 2004. I expected to at least have a barbell in my hands before embarrassing myself.
Things get worse when I go to weigh in: I’m about a pound too heavy for the division I’m supposed to be competing in. My treat-yourself lo mein from last night has backfired spectacularly.
“You still have about an hour before we have to enter totals,” the check-in guy assures me. “So, you know, you can use the bathroom, or hop on a stationary bike.” I spend the next 20 minutes pedaling furiously, jacket zipped to my throat, spitting into a cup every minute or two, miraculously wringing out enough precious ounces.
Here’s how this spectacle actually works: There’s a single barbell used for the entire competition, and you submit the weight you want to start off lifting. More and more weight gets added to that bar as the competition goes along, and it’s your turn once they’ve built up to your chosen weight. If at least two of the judges flash a thumbs up, it’s a good lift. You get to do three snatches with progressively greater loads, and then the whole thing starts over for the clean-and-jerk. And, importantly, you don’t drop the bar until the judges signal you to.
I lost this detail while aggressively clearing my head after my first lift, but fortunately the judges didn’t mind. Tom suggests going up to 99 pounds. The whole thing is smooth this time: pull up, drop down, rise, and wait for it. The judge waves her hand. I drop the bar: “Good lift.”
Another one! I wasn’t expecting this to go so well, frankly. I feel like Thor, but in Ragnarok, because I am both pumped and still aware I look goofy as hell. After another lifter, I’m back on the platform for 116 pounds, which is a full three pounds higher than my personal best, but I’m on a gambler’s high. Why not? As I rise I think, for just a second, This is the heaviest I’ve ever snatched. That lapse in concentration is a mistake, because by the time I’m standing, my elbows are slightly bent. They have to be fully extended. I already know what’s coming.
“No lift.”
Two out of three isn't terrible, I tell myself. Besides, it’s time for the clean-and-jerk, where I know I can lift a lot more weight. I start at 123 pounds, well below the 138 I’ve hit at the gym. I squat down and then pull up, but something’s wrong: The bar doesn’t go high enough, and is too far forward for me to compensate and get underneath. It slams to the floor.
“No lift,” says the emcee, with the flat voice of a jury foreman.
Since my only choice is to do the same weight again, my next turn is now. This time the bar sails up, and I catch it on my flexed shoulders. It definitely wangs the shit out of my right collarbone, but it’s where it needs to be, at least. I breathe, I dip, and launch up, with my feet landing out in a teetering lunge.
“Good lift.”
I walk back to Tom for a tactical huddle. My left shoulder is giving me grief, and it doesn’t bode well that I screwed up what was supposed to be, even for me, a modest weight. We’ll bump my last attempt up to 132, we decide. No personal-best shots this time around.
Trying to keep some kind of rhythm, I go through the same motions: chalk, bend, grab, squat, breathe. I clean, probably smashing the same spot on my shoulder, but there’s too much adrenaline for me to process the pain. As I launch the bar skyward, my elbows just to the sides, and I emit a deeply unattractive and very loud “UUUGGHHH” noise. I land on my ass just before the bar hits the ground, which prompts me to rock backward and start angry-laughing.
“No lift.”
I didn't see what signs the three judges held up, but that verdict was probably unanimous.
Over the rest of the day, I watch with pride as my fellow PFP members do really well. A guy who weighs even less than me breezes past my totals, all while wearing a black buzz-cut toupee wig and a singlet screen-printed to look like Peewee Herman's suit. (It's Halloweekend.) One woman exceeds her personal best by so much that she envelops Tom in a flying-leap hug afterward. His grimace makes clear that her entire leg planted itself in his groin.
I leave before the medals are handed out, because it’s been a day and I need coffee. On the ride home, though, my phone buzzes with a message from Tom:
“You got gold!”
I assume he’s trolling me. “Rude,” I text back. Yet Tom is as earnest and enthusiastic as ever. They give out medals for multiple weight classes, he explains, and I lifted more than anyone else in my age and weight class. I didn’t beat anyone. But I am the only thirtysomething who showed up who weighs as much as I do. This time, that’s enough to make the podium.
I came into my first competition nervous, but in pursuit of what I assumed was a modest enough, two-pronged goal: Do your best, and don’t worry about the results. It turns out I accomplished...neither of these things? I over-thought every turn, missed half my lifts, and turned in a disappointing performance in the clean-and-jerk. But I also walked away with an honest-to-God medal somehow, to bring back to the gym in triumph. (Tom graciously volunteered to pick it up in my absence.)
In retrospect, maybe even this simple gameplan involved too much ruminating and not enough trusting my butt. And so I arrived back home and pushed these thoughts from my head. Just go back to the gym on Monday and line the calluses up where they need to be, I reminded myself. And don’t forget to breathe.
