A damn good fight at nationals!
Sunday, July 27th, 2008Ok before I start the write up let me start with the bad news. My dad fucked up the video taping on practically every event so I only have the truck pull and log medley on tape. Hopefully someone else was taping the whole thing so I can get the rest of the videos, my stone run was the best I have ever done and damn impressive from what I was told. I will have the pics up shortly I need to get the cable from my friend for the camera.
Where do I start?! Coming away with a disappointing 2nd place in my last comp. in Maine I took away many things. Mainly that I needed to control myself when competing which I did phenomenally at nationals and one of the reasons I was happy with 3rd. This was probably my best show, no major mess ups at all which I was happy with. When it was all over I finally realized to myself that this is nationals, not a regular contest. I went up against 16 of the best lightweight in the United States. Taking away a podium finish with no major mistakes that would have upset me severely if I had done poorly because of them. The day before was the worst day of my life, woke up at 4am had a protein shake, got to the hotel around 9am and had an apple before we went into the city to site see. Around 12 I was dying, no water since the protein shake at 4am and I was starving so I had ½ of a footlong steak and cheese from subway and a mouthful of lemonaid. Then we went up to the sears tower after that got lost and walked in a big circle further depleting my energy levels and putting me in a worse mood, lol. On the car ride back to the hotel I treated myself to one of those tiny cereal boxes kids get at hotels for breakfast, a whopping 190cals. Got back to the hotel around 2 passed out until 4ish. Then I went down to the hot tub and sweated out some more water.
We headed down to the weigh ins and 5 and I had weighed myself on the hotel scale before we left and said I was 197. The official weigh in I was 199, ONE pound away from the cut off! Very lucky. After that we went straight to get food then I went home and went to bed. Ate half a bagel with cream cheese, a little coffee and a little juice as well as a banana before the comp. I get bad nerves before comps and can’t eat anything.
First even was the truck pull, it was a semi truck which they said was between 20-30,000lbs (9-13,000KG). The only time I had done a truck pull prior to this was my first comp and I had a torn calf so I really didn’t know what to expect. When I stepped up to get chained in willie askes me what I weighed in at and I laughed and told him 199 and he said damn, you look like you’re 230, you’re going to have a good run. I was towards the end to go and most of the guys were putting up times around 37-35seconds. When I went I got 30seconds flat and set the new record. I ended up taking 3rd in this losing only by 10ths of a second. The guys ahead of me had something like 29.85sec or so. With times that close anything could have set you down a place so I didn’t fret on it to much and tried to focus on the next event.
Log press medley was next, I hate this event. Right now I’m just not built for it and can’t really compete with at 200lbs with guys who are shorter then me and have much less of a ROM then I do. I did what I expected to do, all but the last log which was 230. Only 1 or 2 guys got this. I placed ok in this event, I think 4th or 5th. Overall I was consistently placing just shy of the top 3.
Then we had the tire flip. The tire was very very light, only 500lbs but the catch was there was NO GRIP. Now when guys say there tire has no grip because the nobs are worn down that’s not what I’m talking about, this tire was flat against the ground. There was physically no way to get your hands under it so what we ended up having to do was kind of try to grab on to part of the tread and just lay into it. The guys in the open were even complaining that their tire was easier to flip. Not sure exactly where I placed on this, I had a pretty quick time; I think I placed 3 or 4 on this.
Farmers were up next. It was only 210lbs per hand but for max distance and it was the 2nd to last event and most of us were beat. I was shooting for 3 runs but just barely got 2. This was the worst performance on farmers I have ever had. Never before have I had my grip fail except this time. I placed middle of the pack here and basically blew my shot at winning with this piss poor run. I think I ended up getting ~148ft.
At this point I was 4th place with 53 points, 2nd and 3rd each had 55 and 1st had 61 I think. Stones were last, my favorite. I knew I had to set a damn good time to get some points to place but that wasn’t much of a worry. They ended up changing out stones to the same weights as the heavy weights but that wasn’t a problem for me. I blasted through the first 4 and then set up for the last one which was 335. From what I was told I was about 6 inches from loading it and I was too far back from the platform. Just breaking the stone and bringing it up that far was a big PR for me. I ended up taking 2nd in the stones and only 1 kid was able to load the 335 and he ended up winning the whole thing.
Overall this was a very close race. It was pretty much between me and 5 other kids the entire time, there was a big gap between skill levels for about half the competition. From what I remember the top 5 were pretty much separated by 1 point for a long time. When I can get the official score sheets ill post them up as well. Again this was cut throat competition with the best of the best. This was my 4th comp I have done so I am pretty happy with the results.
As for how the comp went. Very, very well organized we moved along pretty quick. Great job to Jason Bever for his hard work running the show. I want to thank elitefitness.com and agxsports.com for sponsoring me and helping me get to nationals. Without their support i probably would not have been able to go. Also want to thanks APT for donating prizes as well as everyone else that donated things and was there to support us. A few things that I heard brought up by some of the people: The location was kind of small for nationals and kind of secluded. I guess a lot of us were expecting it to be something real big in the city with a lot of spectators. The crowd was also pretty quiet the whole time seeing as it was nationals. I’ve been to a lot smaller shows and had crazier crowds. I didn’t think of this but heard someone bring up that there was no medical staff there. Now that I think of it all the shows I have been to usually had an ambulance there or some medical staff but I guess that boils down to an insurance thing. The important thing is nobody got hurt (that I heard of). Overall it was a great time. Made a lot of friends and was a great show. That’s all I can come up with now, I’m still beat from yesterday and have been up since 3am today so I need to get some rest. I’ll try and get all the pictures up around dinner time.
Me and Tom are both very good deadlifters, its both of ours favorite lift and this was the last thing we were gonna let anyone beat us in! I think we had 7-8 pulls total which was kind of a stupid plan as im sure it took alot out of us for stones (not that it mattered but we’ll get to that in a second). Our best pull was 1200lbs and we missed the 1250. Very happy with this event, can’t wait to see the videos when i get the dvd in the mail. My partner tom is also making a nice poster at his work of the lift.