As many of you know, I was losing my mind last week because my first Olympic Weight Lifting meet got moved up from the first week in February to the second week in January. This cut my training time into… pretty much zero.

That said, the whole purpose of me doing the meet in February wasn’t for me to place or win anything, but simply to get my feet wet and experience my first competition setting. So, in reality, it didn’t really matter that we moved it up, right?

Pretty much.

I had about 2 sessions between when I found out that I could compete and the actual meet, so I tried to make the most of practice without totally burning myself out. For those of you who are wondering what the heck all of this is, here’s a sweet video that one of my coaches shot last week during my final lifting session before the meet…

No big deal, right? That’s only 125#, 10# under my PR weight. MEEP.

Even so, I get superbly nervous about these kinds of things, especially because this was/would be the first time I would ever be competing at something by myself. I’ve always been a team sport girl when it came to competitions. Soccer, Volleyball, Ultimate… It’s never just on *you*.

By the time Friday came, I was strung so tightly it was unbelievable! I ended up spending my night hanging out with some of my CFN boxmates to keep my mind from reeling (thank you all for putting up with me!). After a long night of general chatter and bonding, I headed home and promptly passed out.

My alarm went off at SIX AM the next day (awful, I know), and I threw on my sweats, made some tea, and hopped in the car. The meet was at FDU – Madison, so about an hour’s drive away, and Lauren, Mike (Lauren’s Fiance), Tyler and I were carpooling from CFN. In what I’m sure was an effort to appease my need for timeliness, everyone arrived early or on time, and we were off to Madison by 6:50, as planned. (Phew.)

Of course, nothing is without a hitch, so the weather was pretty gross during our drive. However, our fearless chauffeur, Mike, didn’t let a little hail get in our way, and after many sleep-deprived, inappropriately off-color conversations, and we arrived at FDU (after a quick stop for coffee and cash) at 8am as the first check-ins.

Lauren, Tyler and I filled out our registration forms for the meet, paid our entry fee, and also signed up for our USA-W cards (that’s weightlifting, not wrestling, as Tyler almost found out the hard way when filling out the form online… whoops). I don’t know how other meets do it, but we got to bring our little sign-in card with us to the weigh-in room, which is where we were headed next…

Weighing in was pretty much what Lauren and I had expected. We walked in and there was a female USAW official waiting for us. We told her that it was our first meet, and she was incredibly nice to us, which was great. Essentially the weigh-in is anticlimactic, or I guess it was for us because we didn’t really care what weight class we were in. As expected, it was a bra and panties style operation, and the official actually gave us a whole explanation of why we’re not allowed to wear socks (theoretically you can hide things in there to make you heavier? Honestly I could hide more in my bra, really… but whatever, USAW, whatever). After she weighed us, she told us our weight class for the meet, and then we had to give her our opening lift numbers, in KG, for both the snatch and the clean & jerk. Luckily, Lauren and I knew we were going to have to do that, so we had everything prepared and ready to go. After we told her our openers, we were free to get dressed and head back out.

It was about… 8:20 when we finished all of the check-in procedures, which meant we had…. an hour and 45 minutes until women began to lift. Oye. We were SO ANTSY the entire time we were waiting… Tyler basically saved our lives because we wanted to go in and start warming up an hour before we were set to lift. He kept delaying us and trying to convince us that it was much too early (he was right). We ended up coming up with little tasks to do to distract ourselves. At one point we went and put our singlets on. Then we went back to put our hairbows in. Then we moved our bags to the warmup area. Then we stretched. Then fiiiiiiiiiiiiiinally, about 9:40, we started warming up because we couldn’t take the suspense anymore.

Lauren and I each grabbed a platform… which was SO strange because they weren’t orange like my CFN home… But we got to warm up with two different bars, as well as two types of plates that we had never worked with before, so it ended up being really smart of us to grab two warmup spots. We worked up to our opening weight, which we figured made sense, and then… we were up! Lauren actually ended up being the first lift of the day. Why? Well… let me explain how an oly meet is structured…

The reason you have to give your opening lift amounts when you weigh in, is because that’s how the order of the lifters is decided. The lifter with the smallest opening weight is called first, and they get one minute to attempt their lift. If they miss and want to try again at the same weight, they are able to go again immediately, but with a bit of a longer time (2 minutes). If they make it, they go to the coordinator table and let the meet organizer know what their next attempt will be, which must be higher than their previous attempt, and they get worked into the order accordingly. In this way, weight is never *removed* from the bar, only added, throughout the course of the flight. Once all of the lifters in the flight have completed their 3 attempts, the flight for the first lift is over (which is the snatch), and then in the case of the FDU open, we had a 10 minute intermission, and then the second flight, the clean & jerk, began.

SO!

Lauren and I both had a goal of each making one successful lift of each type during the meet, and so we set our openers to be very, very light for us. Because of that, Lauren was first and I immediately followed her. Wondering if I hit my lift? Well, see for yourself…

Getting up there for the first time was pretty terrifying, and actually, after this lift was complete, they called Lauren to go AGAIN. We panicked because we hadn’t told them our next lift amounts because… we didn’t know how everything was supposed to work at that point!! (Whoops. 😐 )Luckily, the incredibly nice USAW official who had weighed us in yelled over to the people who were kind of miffed at us that “THIS IS THEIR FIRST MEET!” and everyone seemed a touch more understanding after that, so we, again, really appreciated her. Lauren and I figured out a lot of the organizational bits as we moved on in the meet, and we finished our lifts pretty early in our flight. For my last lift I was planning to attempt a pretty small PR, but Tyler sort of egged me on and I ended up with 110#, or 50kg, attempt. Here’s what THAT looked like!

Sooo yep. Snatch PR achieved! It honestly felt so incredibly light, like I could have done 15# more. Crazy. I’m definitely more comfortable with the mechanics of the snatch though, so I guess that plus the adrenaline really pushed me pretty hard.

After we were done with our 3 snatch attempts (I went 3/3 and Lauren went 2/3), a lot more of the ladies still had to lift, so we got to watch some amazing competitors take the platform!

The second flight for us was very similar to the second. Lauren and I were up early on, and once we were done (3/3 for Lauren and 2/3 for me – I missed on a super huge PR attempt on the 3rd lift,) we got to watch more of the women compete. I feel like I learned a *lot* watching everyone, and also just experiencing the stress and craziness of the meet itself. Lauren ended up with a 94kg total and I ended up with a 106kg total for the day, which was totally awesome and above the minimum to qualify for the meet, which I’m so proud of!

Around 11:40, Lauren, Tyler, Mike and I scooted out to grab some Chipotle before Tyler had to weigh in at 1pm… and we got a text from Tom saying that Lauren had medaled! We squeaked with joy for a while, and around 12:45 headed back to get Tyler to weigh in and claim Lauren’s silver medal.

While we were doing that, Tyler went to weigh in and when he was done we all got back together to watch some of the lighter men’s lifting. Some of the guys were amazingly strong, and it was so cool to get to see their different techniques and how their coaches were working with them.

FINALLY at 4pm Tyler’s group finally began. Tyler left his phone with us so we could tape his lifts, and at one point his mom texted him to ask how he was doing. Lauren and I felt it was appropriate to promptly reply with a photo of him, and she was incredibly pleased. Tyler, I think, thought we were ridiculous. Success? I think so. Anyhow, we watched the meet until the end so we could catch all of his lifts, and Tyler also ended up placing second in his class!

After Tyler claimed his medal, Lauren and I snapped the fastest, dorkiest photo ever, and we scooted out of there because we were EXHAUSTED and had been at FDU for pretty much 12 hours… Whoops.

Sooooooooooooo there you have it! After much panicking and stressing out, my first meet is behind me! I’m so incredibly glad I did it this way – I was able to get the first time jitters out when it really “didn’t matter,” I was able to compete with two friends, and I had a total blast!

Would I do it again?

Well…

The NYC Open is on March 16th. You tell me!