Mid Ulster Championship
-2024
My First Competition!
So to kick things off for weightlifting competitions, we have the Mid-Ulster Championships, hosted in The Performance Lab Moneymore on the 17th of February 2024.
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This was my first weightlifting meet and I'm an idiot. Rule 1 of "first comp" be it powerlifting or weightlifting, is "do not cut weight." Well I heard this and completely ignored it. I was about 90kg of Christmas turkey and whiskey on January 1st this year. Easily the worst shape I've been in in a long long time, I was strong, but I looked like a bag of milk.
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Second thing, I decided to enter myself into this competition on the 17th of January. By this stage I was 87kg, giving me exactly one month to lose at least 6kg.
This was pretty much the stupidest situation I could have put myself in.
I think it's fair to say, when you know you've got to rise to the occasion it puts a fair amount of context into things.
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In four weeks I actually overshot my weight loss target. I was competing at 81kg and under, I ended up weighing in at around 79kg on comp day, though my minimum weight during this time was 77.9kg. Competitions farily put a fire under your ass.
I wouldn't say that I did this weight loss in the healthiest way possible. For the first two weeks I was on 1750 calories, then dropped down to 15, then 1400 to finish off. In the first two weeks I was on 30 mins of cardio a day, but because I'm a real person and have a job, all the training was becoming too difficult to stay on top of so I dropped the calories to get rid of the cardio. Honestly though, the weight loss was actually pretty easy. I didn't lose much strength, other than my clean feeling a little more grindy.
The competition Day
I'm happy to say, that despite all of the stupid decisions made, I walked out with Bronze on my first ever meet. As I said, you'll rise to the occasion when you need to. You can see in my face that I wasn't expecting bronze.
We arrived around 8:00 and got weighed in etc, from there it was time to get my morning meals in. I went for pretty basic stuff, I wasn't focusing on being really nutritionally dialled in on this comp and I was already nervous, so I didn't want to upset my wee tum tum. I began lifting in flight B, so I watched some of the fantastic lifters in flight A, which actually really calmed me down to get stuck into my own lifting. I got to see the game being played and what people were up to, it gave me a great head start I think. If I had been in flight A, I think I would have been a lot worse off.
The snatches started off pretty poorly. In the warmup area, an old injury started to show it's face once again which threw off my form a little. However, I made the decision to actually snatch my opener in the warmup area to ease my nerves.
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Full of piss and vinegar from a good lift backstage, I walked right out and... hurled it behind me, completely failing the lift. This totally threw me off, but I managed to keep a lid on it and thankfully I got my second chance to lift it within a few short minutes. The second lift went well - not my best by any means but it landed.
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On my third and final attempt, I hit 75kg on a pretty good rep overall closing out the snatch session.
Cleans benefitted from the success on my final snatch. I think if I had missed another, things would have gone a lot differently.
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I nailed my first attempt, with a good lockout and a pretty solid recovery. I once again lifted this in the warmup area, as it just gave me a confidence boost. Lift number 2 - 100kg - was a lift that was had eluded me multiple times in prep, so I wasn't convinced I'd make it first try. After a pretty long fight for 97.5 amongst the other competitors, I missed my second attempt. However, because my weight hadn't changed, I got back onto the stage quickly enough. This gave me a nice rest period, but enough where I could remember what went wrong.
My third clean went really well, even though I was convinced I was going to fart during the clean. If this had happened, nobody would ever have heard from me again. Ah well, this effort netted me a 175kg Total at 79kg bodyweight and a bronze medal at my first competition. To be completely honest, from a bit of a "fuck it" mentality going in, I actually really surprised myself. I wasn't expecting to be competitive and I thought I was competing to defend second last place. With a four week prep and last minute planning, it really could have been a lot worse, I think if I had spread out a little longer I would have maybe got my 80kg snatch.
My goals for the future are much much bigger, I want to hit an 85-90kg snatch in training pretty soon and bring my jerk pb to 110 to match my clean more. There's obvious weak sports, and with 16 weeks to prep for my next go, it's given me newfound interest in training. This was a great experience and I am really looking forward to my next one in June!