Iron and Iodine

After a weeks of early mornings, long days, on-call overnight shifts at the hospital as a newly minted surgery clerk.. My first amateur weightlifting competition.

“You give me little bit heart attack.”

Coach says as I come off the platform, having finally made my last of 3 attempts at my opening lift. It’s close to 6 pm and he’s been at the gym for 11 hours already shepherding my team mates through their session, absorbing their anxieties and managing their stress. Mentally, he’s lifted every one of our lifts with us. And he’s still here, accompanying me through my first little weightlifting competition.

Hell, I gave my own self a heart attack. [in weight-lifting comps, you get 3 attempts at each of Snatch and Clean&Jerk. If you don’t make any of your Snatch attempts, you’re disqualified].

Many people wonder aloud and often how weightlifting can be a team sport. “It’s just you and the bar. I don’t get it.” And if we were to be quite concrete about it, that’s true. I like only having to rely on myself to make lifts, to train hard. But the team is what remains when your “self” control suddenly disintegrates.

My opening weight for my first comp was a weight I should have been able to do if awoken from a deep sleep**. We’d planned it that way. Warm up went great. Things felt snappy and fresh. But somehow a moderately heavy bar became an unruly god damn elephant stuck in a bog. And those first harrowing minutes were a whole lot of me fending off the sickening feeling of disappointment mixed with the panicky sensation of having no control over my limbs.

I still don’t really know what happened in those failed attempts. I won’t bore you with morose speculation of how I became mentally hamstrung. (This is nothing special. It’s a phenomenon that has been experienced by every weight lifter ever). But I can tell you that my team is what drove every successful attempt thereafter.

It was Vai who got my water, and changed my plates in the warm up. It was Mary and Kyle and Leann who beamed from an audience of strangers. It was Martha, who volunteered to drive my car the 4 hours home so I could rest and recover for work this morning. And Niki who kept checking in. And Irina who tore a strip off one of novice refs for a questionable call. And Ashley who gave me pep talks. It was the people who messaged me during the day to say they were thinking about our crew and sending good vibes. And the people who stopped me before and after training sessions this week to wish me good luck. It was Coach.

This year has been and will be a real struggle trying to balance my academic goals with my personal ones. Trying to shoehorn proper recovery into the sporadic windows allotted by the hospital’s powers-that-be. There will be a lot of firsts, and a lot of failures. Yesterday, for example, I thought I was easily going to qualify for provincials and was firmly rebuffed. I’m disappointed in my performance, because I’m not a fan of all the excuses teeming in my head.

But this isn’t over. It’s barely the prologue. And the team is what makes this possible, what keeps me positive, and what gives shape to the word “potential”.

This is the grind and this is the sport; what little I understand of it. As it stands, I don’t lift heavy weights compared to athletes in the big leagues. It doesn’t mean I never will. And this is the journey. With my team.