This past Friday, June 14, I represented Ontario in the male 61 kg weight class at the national Canadian Junior Weightlifting Championships. Aiming for a champion finish with the best lifters from other provinces competing as well, I knew I had my work cut out for me.
The sport of weightlifting tests two lifts: the snatch, which has the lifter bring the barbell overhead in one smooth motion; and the clean and jerk, which has the lifter bring the barbell to their collarbones first from which they will then raise the bar overhead. This is a very gross oversimplification of the complexity of these movements — while they certainly sound easy enough, there’s a lot that needs to go right for a lift to be successful and there’s much more that can go wrong.
The sum of the number of kilograms an athlete lifts in the snatch and the clean and jerk is their “total” and whoever has the highest total wins. The total that I had qualified for Nationals with was 160 kg / 353 lbs, with a 70 kg / 155 lbs snatch and 90 kg / 198 lbs clean and jerk. This is a total I would soon find out that all 10 athletes in my class were within 5 kg of. With two of them having numbers above mine as well, a first place finish was looking more and more distant as more time went on.
I wasn’t discouraged though — if anything, it had lit a dangerous fire under me. “Win at whatever cost” became my mantra, and I followed it heretically. In the two months I had spent preparing for the meet with my coach, the Romanian weightlifter Marius Pop, I devoted almost all my free time towards training or recovery. As the intensity and duration of my sessions increased (to a maximum of three hours per session, four to five times a week), I also decreased the amount I ate accordingly to lose the four kilograms necessary to make my weight class. In other words, I had to get stronger while getting lighter — a task whose difficulty I cannot adequately describe within the confines of the English language.
As you might expect, those two months were spent in agony. There were many days where I physically did not have the energy to study or to hang out with friends after training. Social outings to restaurants or spending time doing some sort of physical activity like basketball or rock climbing were also completely off limits due to my heavily restrictive diet and recovery capacity.
My knees and shoulders would often have waves of extreme pain radiate through them if I spent too long in any one position or if I walked a bit too quickly down the stairs. I had to spend hours stretching or foam-rolling to make the pain bearable enough to go about my day. As I was also working full time with a professor, along with some side jobs that include being a personal trainer at PAC, a staff writer at Imprint, and a medical assistant on the weekends, I often found myself in the deep depths of mental exhaustion along with my already extensive physical exhaustion.
Time management was difficult. I would sleep at 9-10 p.m. most days, waking up around 5 a.m. to complete all my work in the early mornings when I had enough calories to be mentally present and the least amount of fatigue. I had to schedule my midday obligations around my training schedule as well so that nothing in my normal life would interfere with my preparation for the competition.
Surprisingly and perhaps worryingly though, I didn’t care about my severely low quality of life at the time. I believed, like many other athletes competing at a high level, that the ends justifies the means. Unfortunately for me, my results only served to further confirm this belief. My best total had steadily increased from 160 kg to around 191 kg / 421 lbs (85 kg / 187 lbs snatch, 106 kg / 234 lbs clean and jerk) two weeks out from my meet, putting me around 30 kg above the next competitor and pretty much securing a gold medal provided I didn’t get injured.
My performance at the competition did ultimately end up falling short of my expectations, however, and this was likely because I weighed the lightest I’ve ever been in years: 60.48 kg. I snatched 79 kg / 174 lbs and cleaned and jerked 98 kg / 216 lbs for a total of 177 kg / 390 lbs — a comfortable 8 kg above the person in second place.
While everything turned out fine in the end, I’m aware that what I did was inadvisable at best, stupid at worst. Balance should always be prioritized over performance, no matter how important adding one more kilogram to a lift, losing one more second in a race, or adding one more metre in a throw may seem. Even so, I would do everything I did over again if it meant I could perform even just a bit better.
To explain why I would is a difficult undertaking because I would assume my reasoning sounds completely incomprehensible to anyone. Even if all these goals are self-imposed, even if they’re causing me intense anguish, I wouldn’t stop. I wouldn’t even be able to. To call it an obsession would be incorrect — that doesn’t nearly encompass the foolhardiness of my actions. “Compulsion” would probably be a more apt description: an irresistible and completely involuntary urge to continue training, even against my conscious wishes. Yes, I cannot stop simply because I cannot fathom stopping. Giving up has never been an option, let alone a possibility, in my mind.
Despite how nonsensical this may seem, I’m sure any other athlete would agree with me. Jade Song, author of Chlorine and former competitive swimmer, wrote, “No one but the teenage swimmer cares about a high school athlete’s swimming results. Yet those… races are all that matters… to the athlete. The trying is what makes them, them. And me. And you.” Maybe it sounds like a curse, being forced to reach ever higher, but the curse is what becomes the heavier barbell, becomes the podium finish, becomes the gold medal. At a certain point, the curse becomes you — your effort sculpting them into a person previously unrecognizable, and from which you can never go back to who you were before you started.
In terms of my future goals, there aren’t any international competitions left this year that I can qualify for, but I am planning to compete in both senior and junior provincials in November and December. I’m also continuing to train (albeit at a lower intensity) towards a total that will qualify me for the 2025 English Commonwealth Games, the 2025 Pan-American Championships, and 2025 World Championships. Of course, the ultimate goal is the 2028 LA Olympics, after which I will retire and switch to shuffleboard.
