Lift with care

Weightlifting can appear to be a loud, aggressive sport, not a place one might expect to find deep care.

Weightlifting can appear to be a loud, aggressive sport.  

If you’ve ever sat in a room with three or four lifters training, you’ll know the sound of barbells being dropped, often from overhead, laden with 70, 80, 90 kilograms of plates. The sound travels through the floor, up your legs and into your jaw.

I still flinch, jump as if I’ve never heard such a sound before, and was not expecting it.

There’s often music. Some blokes seem to like death metal to get them through a maximal attempt at a back squat. So loud it seems to block out the light coming in the windows.

Some lifters stamp their feet and scream before approaching the bar, summoning their chosen emotion before they wrap their fingers around it. Once you have your hands on that bar, you no longer think, coach Ricky says.

No more thinking.

The weightlifting gym is not somewhere one might expect care.

Firstly, we care about the equipment.

You respect the bar. Never step over it. Tidy your plates. Load your bar appropriately. Don’t drop the bar onto the metal frame of the platform. Squat to the empty bar and clean all chalk from it with a small nail brush when you finish your session.  And for the love of god, don’t lean on a fully chalked hand to get up off the black matted floor, even if your knees won’t allow you to rise gracefully like everyone else.

Secondly, we care about each other.

Don’t walk in front of someone performing a lift. Share your platform when the gym is busy. Don’t sit on your phone between sets and lose concentration or rest more than necessary.

These things are just good manners and while this approach keeps me coming back to this particular gym, it’s the deep care that I have received from other lifters and the coaches that has taken me by surprise.

After I wrote about the whole rehab and lifting thing last year, I was talked into entering two lifting competitions.

There was never any question that I would be competitive. The point of entering the competition was to learn, not to beat anyone. I would lift barely any weight. I was to perform the lifts and learn to feel the particular rhythms of a competition.

I was doubtful.

“I’m not sure I can do a competition,” I said to Ricky.

“Do you always talk to yourself like this?” he said.

I completed the entry form and figured it was by then too late to pull out.

I trained as well as I could but knew I could have done more. I tried to eat properly and lose a little bit of weight so I wouldn’t have to compete in the open weight range at the top end of the scale. From what I’d seen on Instagram, those women were tall AND large and given my height, I really should be competing in a much lower range.  

I knew I’d have to go in as I was: short and fat.

In the days leading into the first competition – a local one at a Homebush sporting hall, site of the 2000 Olympics and the first time women’s weightlifting was included in the Games – I started panicking. I wanted to pull the plug, to email the organisers and say, I’m sorry, there has been a mistake. I will not be competing after all.

What was I thinking? I have been lifting for less than 12 months and here I am thinking I can walk out onto a platform in front of judges and an audience and lift the bar?

Danica, a Masters World Champion, must have sensed my creeping inclination to flee and forget I’d ever agreed to enter.

A couple of days before the competition she invited me to meet her at Mahon Pool for a swim. We stood in the water, and she talked me through what would happen, how I should prepare, what I should expect and importantly, what I should leave to the coaches.

All you have to do, she said, is lift the bar. Everything else is up to the coach. Don’t worry about the numbers, when to warm up, what to do. We will tell you that. You have one job.

One job. Easy for you, I wanted to say, as I looked at the straps of her swimwear struggling to contain her impressive trap muscles.

But I didn’t. I listened and allowed myself to trust her.

Competition scenes in Homebush and Auckland.

What I didn’t expect about weightlifting, is that it can be a team sport. It’s not just about you alone trying to wrestle a bar from the floor. In a club like Atletika, you support your team mates. You watch them lift. You film their lifts so they can analyse their performance later. You take photographs. You lay around and share food and relax and chat before your session.

Like Danica, Alex also seemed to know that this competition was going to be a hard ask for me.  After I weighed in, she took me outside and we talked.

I don’t remember what we talked about, I just remember how she made me feel.

I felt like someone was taking care of me. It was gentle and understated, like this sort of thing was completely normal to her.  She knew what I needed, and she met those needs, without being asked.

In the warm up room I was, as Danica said, directed to the platform I was to use to prepare. I was given a barbell. I was told how many times to lift it and how. I was told how long to sit in the plastic chair to rest. Once the time was up, I was told to stand up and lift again.

I was the first competitor to attempt a lift. As I was lifting very little weight and this was an open competition, all three of my lifts would probably be completed before anyone else even got near the platform.

I don’t remember much about the lifting itself. Once I did the first one, ducking my head into the lights so I couldn’t see anyone in the audience, I became less tense. I didn’t hit all the lifts. I missed one of the snatches and one of the clean and jerks, the clear disappointment on my face admonished by the judge. You need to learn to keep a straight face, she said.

Ricky had told me, if you act like you completed the lift when you make a small technical mistake, sometimes the judges don’t notice it. I need to rid myself of the habit of screwing up my face when I know I’ve done something wrong, or even when I haven’t.

After the final clean and jerk, which I think I missed, I went back into the warmup room.

You did it, Danica said. You did the only thing you had to do. You lifted the bar.

She put her arms around me, and I began to cry. I dug my head into her shoulder and realised it was too late, my body had begun to shake with sobs.

Years of pain, years of doubt and shame, it began to come out.

I was safe in their care.

I competed again two weeks later, in Auckland. Again, Danica and Alex, assisted this time by Enif, provide a blanket of care through which I emerged, out onto the platform and back into the warm up room.

It wasn’t always gentle. Danica stood over me like a school principal, silently demanding I lift the amount of weight she had nominated, whilst making it feel like I had a choice. I was slapped on the back so hard it stung. But Enif tenderly reassured me, whispering into my ear and Alex stood at a distance, smiling and nodding at all the correct times.

I haven’t competed again. I’ve injured myself more times than I care to count. But I am still in the gym and the platform, under lights with a tiny audience, beckons.

The three women have told me: no excuses.