Choosing Another Direction is Not Failure (I Think)

I have neither failed nor am I giving up. The Atlantic recently published a piece entitled “How to Walk Away: The Psychology of Lost Causes.” I saw this article right around the time I concluded I needed to move away from staying at 105 for my own sanity, and I’d recommend that anyone who’s contemplating a shift in their life read it. It really intones the concept of cutting one’s losses, but cutting my losses is something I’m not good at and I need to keep the concept in mind as I work my way through where I want to be with lifting.

I have chosen not to compete in the 105 weight class in the foreseeable future, but I do not consider that weight class a “lost cause,” and it being a “lost cause” is not why I chose to abandon it.

Here is a vlog I recorded yesterday explaining the reasons behind this decision and a little bit of my ideas about my semi-near future in powerlifting.

The Changing Room Oracle

I like to think Target changing rooms as akin to the Oracle from The Matrix. I go into one, strip down, and Changing Room Oracle reveals things to me about myself that I don’t know, do know, know to be possibly true in the future, know may never be true and maybe it’s just the shitty fluorescent lighting. In other words, when I use a Target changing room and am suddenly able to view my body from about five different angles simultaneously, I usually walk away from the experience with less clarity in my self-image than when I went in.

I visited Target and its changing rooms about a week ago. I didn’t  have solid cause to do so–I didn’t need new clothes, really. I just felt drawn to the ritualistic practice of trying stuff on in a store as a way to evade facing current problems (example: I’m not going to be able to renew my driver’s license before I turn 27 and then I’m going to be driving around on the edge of committing a misdemeanor if I get pulled over, fuuuuuu) and went with Targets red-doored changing rooms in a quest to remain relatively un-harassed by store attendants, as Target’s tend to be pretty neutral on whether or not you actually buy anything.

Who am I? What’s going on? Onion rings?

Inside, I tried on the six garments I brought with me–yoga pants (yes!) some shirts (why did I pick these shirts?) and a irregularly-cut sweater (this is either really edgy or stupid-looking). The shirts and weird, decidedly stupid-looking sweater go first and all are voted down. Then I get to the yoga pants and try them on. They fit well through the butt, the thighs, and then bag and gap like crazy down at my knees. What? What is this crap? How can my KNEES be too small? Why is everything too BIG for me somehow? The stream of frustrated internal grumbling begins and leads to a solid round of self-critique.

What does this have to do with lifting? Well, the Matrix’s Oracle would probably be inclined to answer “something, and nothing.” I believe that you’re in the best place to be the best lifter possible when you are in possession of clear, honest self-knowledge on both a corporeal and psychological level. I know that I am not in possession of this level of self-awareness–yet. I strive for it, by way of striving to understand how I set up obstacles for myself mentally and how I might begin to overcome them.

I admit that one of my self-imposed obstacles is a continued struggle to decide how exactly I feel about being a lightweight powerlifter–specifically, how I feel about being a ligthweight female powerlifter in the 105 lb weight class. I am used to deciding on an action and then going after it with single purpose, and my ability to do so in pursuing a successful 105 career is complicated by the following:

1. History. I struggle to set aside a history–mentioned in this blog many times at this point–of eating disorders in which being small meant I self-identified in a certain way.

2. Personal sense of aesthetics. I absolutely love having muscle on my body on a purely aesthetic level. It is fascinating to me, and if I’ve ever felt positive about anything regarding my body–pretty freaking rare on a scale of “how often something is likely to happen–it has been in relation to the evidence of corporeal adaptation to force that is muscle-building. If I want to stay in the 105 weight class, there is a simply a limit to how much muscle size I am “allowed” to put on. This sucks. I really struggle with this.

3. An awareness of the no-man’s-land small lifters sometimes inhabit in the lifting world. In a subculture that touts such slogans as “lift big eat big” and the perilously-close-to-size-shaming “strong is the new skinny” adage aimed at women, I don’t fit in. I can’t eat big on a regular freaking basis, ok? I need to stay in the 105 class and still attempt to lift big. I AM, in many people’s body spectrum, skinny.

I admit to having a desire to “fit in” in the community I love. Yes, there’s “room for all of us.” But within the scope of that room exist a lot of contradictory ideas and conversations. If strength training is to be an answer to negative ways in which many women think about their bodies, these contradictions need to be addressed, and I guess I’m doing so in my whiney, “woe-is-me-I-feel-persecuted”-sounding blog post today.

I will argue that I don’t feel persecuted, but that as someone who feels like a weird outlier in the world from which she escapes feeling like an outlier in “the real world,” I do notice contradicting attitudes and I’m relatively aware of how they might function negatively for other lifters. I have no solution for what I perceive to be a problem in some of the more feminist embraces and bodies of rhetoric surrounding strength training. My job, as I see it, is to persevere and keep trying to lift better. In my pursuit of knowing myself better as a lifter both physically and how I fit within the lifting community, I have to ignore a lot and write my own damned rules.

On Monday, I turned 27. My goal is to have these rules nailed down by the time I’m 30. Time to amp things up.

                          

^^Nostalgia indulgence ftw, damn do I wish it was still cool to like this movie^^

611 Total at 105 lb and Gut Rebellion: The Pretty and the Ugly of My April 20th Meet

Missing one , but this is most of our most excellent team after the meet on Saturday. Note Kyle’s moustache. Also, I look freaking tiny in this group.

After my meet, I rank at #5 (tied with another lifter) in the country in my weight class. My squat ranks at #10 in the 105 lb class, my bench #8, and my deadlift #4. I totaled 611 at this meet and won best female lifter.

There’s the press-release version of my experience on April 20th. I achieved a top-ten-ranking total, which I wanted, and I succeeded at making weight, which was a victory in itself. That said, the weight cut and its aftermath was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. The  cut was psychologically taxing in a way I’ve never been psychologically taxed. The new experience of cutting weight and THEN competing had me drained by the end of this past Saturday.

I did not count on the cut being as difficult to recover from as it was. To reference a popular meme, one does not simply eat a sh*t ton of food after a weight cut and drink a lot in order to make up for the time spent fasting. Depending on who you are, and particularly if you are me, your stomach may have shrunk during your fasting period. It’s literally impossible to eat at the quantities I’m normally quite good at eating–carb loading doesn’t work during a weight cut recovery, at least not in the way one normally might go about it. By the time the morning of the meet arrived, I wasn’t where I normally am in terms of carb-loading weight the day of a meet.

Top this off with a fantastic, anxiety-induced bout of spastic colitis the day of the meet and you have less-than-optimum conditions to go and lift fantastically. I don’t really have spastic colitis, it seems, except for when I do meets–I had the issue at the last one too, but not remotely as severely. I walked around in pain for most of meet day, and the pain immediately went away when deadlifting was done. This means that I have GOT to come up with a way to manage meet anxiety in the future. It seems that this condition, related to anxiety, runs on my mother’s side of the family, and it’s something I need to take into account when competing.

This leads me to perhaps the most important part of this writeup–I’m pretty sure I forgot to have fun at this meet. My anxiety levels were so absolutely through the roof at this meet that I was unable to put it and its outcome in perspective. I do not want this to be the case for the July meet. To be completely honest, I remember walking around at the meet and thinking “this is not good–I’m not enjoying this or having fun, and that is NOT a good sign.” Meets are exhausting but they shouldn’t feel like you’re living out a personal hell. My other two meets WERE fun. I believe a meet CAN be fun even if I’m cutting weight for it–it’s all in how I perceive it. I put so much pressure on myself to do well as a 105-er that I completely melted down. This is what makes this meet bittersweet–I did quite well, particularly considering I dropped a weight class, I made a PR total, and I am now ranked quite high on a national level in the sport. These are all good things, but my poor management of my mental inclinations towards apprehension, worry, excessively high standards, and placing undue, disproportionate amounts of pressure on myself absolutely sabotaged some elements of this meet for me. I learned about myself physically, but even more mentally. Yes, this is a sport intently focused on the body, but the growth I’ve mentally experienced over the one year I’ve been engaged in powerlifting has to eclipse the physical gains I’ve made. I have no doubt of this.

I did get in some relatively decent lifting despite some of the conditions I’ve described here. Here’s a video of my deadlift:

My anxiety did quiet periodically during the meet. When I focused on other lifters on my team, it was probably at its lowest. Kyle pulled a 573 deadlift–which was absolutely the highlight of the meet for me–and his deadlift is now ranked the #2 deadlift in this weight class (148 lb) in the country. Some of our lifters had outstanding meets, with Kevin Alvarez  (competing in the 220 lb weight class) taking the best male lifter award and having a stellar performance with a 611 squat.

We had multiple lifters doing their first meet with us, and I was happy to help and guide them in any way I could on that day. Working with the team brought me the most joy out of this day, and it is a large part of why I love competing.

 ——————-

So I’m in recovery now, doing what I like to call a “reload” week of very light training coming out of the meet, which was only a few days ago. I am SO happy to be back in the gym, and so happy to be allowed to eat salt again. My weight is 110.2 lb as of this morning, so I didn’t manage to gain a few pounds (and I’m talking body mass, NOT water retention) with the weekend like I have in the past. This all adds up to one inevitable conclusion: I deserve some freaking onion rings.

Kyle, If your intent with the moustache growth was to drive me away, it didn’t work.

Night Before Weigh-Ins: A Check-In With ABS AGAIN

My weight is tracking well. I stopped eating today at 2 PM and drinking ceased at 7 PM. Weigh-ins should be at 7 PM tomorrow. I dislike the hunger and I’m nowhere near 24 hours with it. The one good thing about this process is that my abs become more defined by the hour. Seriously. I can see the difference. And I don’t goddamn care if I never see them again–or at least not until I weigh in for another meet. This sucks. Tomorrow evening is going to be a freaking food fest.

Ugh, not worth it. Ladies, please, stop coveting abs on Pinterest. They are evil.

The Suspense Builds/My Body is a Science Experiment

Well, I’m on what LOOKS like a crash diet, and what I’m doing is acting like one. Many “cleanse” diets capitalize on the effects of sodium depletion/water loading to rid your body of water weight and make you think you’re losing actual body mass quite quickly–remember, a few pounds less or more on either side of your normal weight probably means nothing more than you have more or less water sitting around in your body. As a strength athlete looking to weigh in as light as possible while still retaining my normal body composition, I look to manipulating water retention levels in order to make weight to my advantage.

This process isn’t easy, and if you’re a lightweight lifter, it can be difficult to eat foods at the volume you normally eat that do not contain lots of carbs and/or sodium but give you a comparable caloric exchange. Olive oil has NO sodium in it but fills entirely less of my stomach than, say, Greek yogurt. Spending day after day feeling like you’re not eating anything even if you’re getting a comparable amount of calories to what you normally eat is shitty. It just is. I have traveled the anorexia path (and well beyond it, thankfully), and the resonance with those days that has danced along the edge of the water weight cut experience for me is slightly haunting. I am prone to being overanxious, and trying to manage my diet in the way I must in order to successfully weigh in on Friday is both logistically difficult and one that causes me to confront some of the darkest times of my psychological history to date. My goal is to learn the process of weight cutting and normalize it such that it is not a mental burden in this manner. It is not a process that will happen overnight, or with one weight cut. Or two. It’s a hard process, but what I AM learning is that pushing myself through it not only physically but mentally is spurring growth and understanding that can only strengthen me for the future.

Take a look at this screen shot to get an idea the “science experiment” aspect of this process:

I’m sure this chart looks OCD as hell. It is this spreadsheet, as well as one documenting my intake, that has helped me manipulate this process. Please note that the weight being documenting/followed in February starts at the day after I had a cheat meal–and a freaking HUGE one, therefore I weighed a hell of a lot more than I typically do–down to the night before the final day of my weight cut for that trial week. I started out this week at what is much more normal a weight for me, as demonstrated by the first number for the week of the 15th.

More to come regarding this process. I may write a more comprehensive guide sheet for women’s weight cutting after I do this meet–my site has been getting a relatively solid amount of traffic from people running “women cutting water weight” or “women weight cut” or “women make weight” through google.

I will now leave you with this image of my abdomen. Every day I wake up during this trial, my abs look different. I think tomorrow will probably be the day I get more pictures of them as well as what my body composition has been doing lately. SKIN. SKIN EVERYWHERE.

I Instagrammed my abs. I’m probably going to do it again. The Situation LIVES.

Confessional: 1 Week From a Meet Means Psychoanalysis

Wrapping up for one of the final bench sessions before April 20th’s meet day.

 

I’m pretty good at making myself cry.  I can sit in front of a computer and write about an upcoming powerlifting meet, and I can bring myself to the verge of tears while doing so. How? We’ll get to that.

I’m about to take a week off, barring a session on what will probably be Wednesday, in order to deload for this meet. I’ll do some work on squat and bench today, and that will be mostly it. I find that I tend to be mentally quieter in the period leading up to a meet–both inwardly and outwardly I become a bit more reserved. I haven’t updated my blog in a while and feel like I SHOULD do so but find that during the lead-up period to a meet I have a hard time talking about it extensively. I’ve really been searching myself and trying to be honest with myself about where this reticence is coming from, and I am relatively sure it’s a product of a kind of cycle. I don’t like to speak about my projections for a meet because I place SO much pressure on myself to make them that the idea of failing to do so–and others witnessing me doing so, and having to discuss my failure should it occur–is very repellant to me. Thinking about it makes me feel very uncomfortable and inclined to hide away from the lifting community until I just go and execute my lifts and compete.

What you can be critical of, reading the above paragraph, is how much it smells of fear. My hesitations and reservations as mentioned are sourced in a fear of failure, and fear will not serve me as I prepare for this meet. The first thing I’ve learned to do when confronting fear is to ask myself what will happen if the worst thing I fear happens. In this case, I must ask myself: what if I screw up at this meet badly? What do I MOST fear about that? I believe the answer to this is the idea of letting other people down, of feeling others’ disappointment in me. The fallacy here is that the only way anyone has a right to be disappointed in me if my performance is sub-par at this meet is if I somehow fail to make my best effort at succeeding. If I have a hangover the morning of the meet, you have reason to be disappointed in me. If I take care of myself in the best way I can before the meet and still do badly, you do not.

Whatever I do at this meet will be OKAY. It will be ENOUGH. I come from that fantastic camp of people who not only feel like anything they ever do is never enough, but much of what they do is egregiously crappy. Focusing on the idea that my best effort is enough–prepare yourself–actually makes me tear up. This is probably the case because I live under an enormous pressure of the kind of negative self-reinforcement pattern just described 24/7 in relation to almost everything I do.

That sounds a little extreme, doesn’t it? Well, it is. I will be the first to tell you that I have acknowledged that it is. I will then tell you that I wish to change it, but I know it’s going to take years to do so, because this mentality was built over years. To be honest, being aware of how unproductive my mode of thought is often results in my feeling flawed to an even further degree–I am aware that I move through life handicapped by myself. I do not place limits on myself, I exact expectations that are unrealistic.

You have to be aware of yourself mentally to a surprising degree to really excel in this sport. You do not have to be perfect–you have to know the mind you’re going to be using to animate your body, and you have to know its weaknesses. These are my weaknesses. I’m going to try, during the week, this time, to challenge my thought patterns. I will check in with a note as to how it’s going, and I promise it will be as honest as what I write here.

On a somewhat less pensive ending note, here’s an image from the article I wrote for Tribesports. I came up with a guide to my own initiation into powerlifting and a bit of introductory discussion of it for readers. Take a look at the article here:

http://tribesports.com/blog/getting-stronger-how-powerlifting-helped-me-move-my-strength-training-to-the-next-level

Countdown to NASA Iowa Regionals on April 20th: Winter is Coming

I get to wear one of THESE again.

There are three Mondays, counting this half-over one, left before my meet. I have two weeks left of training time. I have one deload/make-weight week to survive. On April 20th, Winter comes.

As discussed in my squat fail post from a few weeks back, I tend to think about my lifting in rather dramatic, sometimes even epic terms. It defense of this melodrama, the idea correlating lifting with the term “epic” can be justified if one remembers that one’s lifting career should be thought of as a grand history–an accumulation of events over a long period of time. In past months, I have learned to think of my training in terms of years more than ever, and in that way, while this coming meet is one I take extremely seriously, its pressure is diluted by the fact that it is one point in a long series of points that make up my competitive career.

At this point, I must accept that my strength is probably not going to increase to a much greater degree before the meet. Two weeks of training left means that I will kick my ass in the time I have left to lift–after, I don’t really know or understand any other way to do it–but that my mental focus is now intent on using training sessions to prepare myself for actual meet day. More and more, as I approach a loaded bar I am imagining the look and feel of the loaded bar on the competition platform.

I feel as if my understanding of my weaknesses in my lifts only became clearer towards the end of the time period between my last meet in October and this one. Let’s discuss these weak points as they may manifest at the meet lift by lift:

Squat

I will make this face again.

My sticking point in this lift is just out of the hole. Unless you’re an advanced lifter, your sticking point on the squat is likely to be around this point too, particularly if you have similar leverages to mine. I have an annoying habit of slowing my eccentric up too much as I descend into the hole when squatting and have only recently–as in the past few weeks–started to try to address this. If I can keep myself from practically pausing the squat even though I feel the weight of a max attempt on the bar, I may be able to power through my sticking point to make the lift I just missed in training–192. Overall, my confidence in relation to my squat on meet day isn’t high. It’s difficult to miss a projected attempt and not have it temper your enthusiasm about that lift on meet day, but I’m endeavoring not to let this happen. I am optimistic that I’ll handle my eccentric at the meet better than I did on the recent attempt, and that a deload week will help with this lift as I believe it will with my others.

Bench

This is how I feel about benching sometimes.

I haven’t tested my competition grip bench in quite some time; technically since around December. I’ve tightened my technique on the lift to a greater degree since my last meet, but my strength about two inches off my chest is not fantastic, and it will be the deciding point in a max attempt. As I have mentioned in this blog roughly two hundred times, I’m not proportioned well for bench so bar control really throws in a solid curve ball on this lift. If I waver in my control with the bar on the eccentric or even the handoff, I lose a LOT of valuable energy. This was the difference between missing my second attempt and then making it on my bench in October. How do I think I’ll do at the meet? If I don’t make 126, I will be disappointed.

Deadlift

Well…this one is interesting. My rep maxes have gone through the roof–my max deadlift right now is supposed to be 300, but pulling 270 for six and then 285 for three a few weeks later really suggests my max is higher than 300. I’d like to see a pull at 304 or above at this meet. Preferably above.

Now, let’s discuss the further complication to this meet of making weight. I failed to make weight the first time I’ve ever tried it. I failed, however, by one pound. My weight is now down from the point at which I did my trial cut, and I’m somewhat convinced I’m slightly leaner than that time period. I may do some composition analysis regarding my muscular development (this will probably mostly be me ripping on my tiny quads and glutes) and write about it here in a week or so. Overall, I have changed some things leading up to this next cut and am most likely in a better position initially to make weight than I was during the trial. That said, if I do make weight, it will be a new addition to the considerations around participating in a meet, and I have no idea how it may affect my lifting on the 20th. No idea. So stay tuned, and know that the Onion Ring Winter is coming (read: no more carb loading until the meet, so goodbye onion rings. They will be missed).

O, onion ring(s), how I yearn for thee.

Long Time No Post, So Here’s Some Deadlift Action

Holy balls, this is what happens when you’re trying to get your MFA finished and run a lifting blog at the same time. MFA and training win, apparently. But I’m every day closer to finishing with the degree, and have more time in the coming days to blog, so I shall. So for now I’ll leave you with this badly-narrated video of me hitting 285 lb x 3 with a bodyweight of 110 lb.

285 x 3 is a rep PR. My next meet is April 20th, so hopefully this is a good sign for that. my last meet PR was 292. Now I’m repping close to that. Dayum.

To Err is Human, to Fail Gracefully is Divine: Sometimes I Fall Short (And Miss a Squat)

I walked the weight out, and it did not feel as heavy to manage on my back as I had expected. The descent wasn’t the worst I’ve executed, nor was it the best, but for an eccentric portion of a max-attempt lift, it was mostly a solid one. Mostly. If you watch the video of me failing a 192 pound squat, you will notice that in my eccentric there’s kind of a hiccup to my movement, a loss of control as I lower myself towards the bottom of the lift. I posit that it was this little dip and shift in control in the lift that cost me some energy and contributed to the teeter-totter-like struggle I had with the bar coming out of the hole.

Here is some melodrama–as I have been told at various times in my life, it is my specialty. When I go in for a max attempt lift, I think about it like going to war. I am either going to win or I am going to die. It’s ridiculous, this conviction, but my emotions don’t seem to spend too much time being concerned with what is reasonable, realistic, or reality. I go into a lift and I will fight it out until someone takes it from me, as has happened at meets, or until I burn all of my energy for that lift out, as I did on this failed attempt. I wanted this lift like I haven’t wanted a lift in a while–I haven’t done any max attempts in a while, actually, and have not tested my squat since July. My squat has grown stronger and I have grown more anxious to break 190 lb.

I have a nearly 3x bodyweight deadlift and a 1.5-ishx bodyweight squat. It’s not a difference I relish. My pride and my sense of what lifts make one a “legitimate lifter”–the squat is king, as the title of one EliteFTS article that comes to mind intones–and I’m not happy with my 187 max. So unhappy that I literally cried over this fail. That’s right, I will get into confessional territory here–I cried later on in the evening after this fail, and then I woke up and cried at 5 AM again about it. Am I proud of this? No. Does it mean I have a worrying relationship with myself in relation to my lifting? Yes. When I lost that squat, I was captured by the opposite side as spoils of war. I didn’t win on the battlefield and I didn’t die on it–now I was in the weird, ugly territory of sitting around in a mental holding cell having to deal with my body’s capacity not being great enough to achieve my goal. On that day, at least. Because if you watch that video, this is not a squat in which I get flattened. One less screw-up in the eccentric, one more ounce of energy on that day, a better amount of recovery from a recent squat session–I could have had it. I’m close.

The next time I’ll attempt this lift will be at my next meet. The next time I’ll attempt making 105 will be for my next meet. A lot is riding on April 20th, and I think my greatest goal of all is to be resolved to handle whatever happens with greater grace than I handled this fail. Because it wasn’t failure, it was a failed squat.

I’ll see you again, 190+ lb squat.

Body Image Woes and Victories/Janis Goes on a Rant

I think a huge amount of the issues women have with self-hatred and lack of self-acceptance come from some sort of deepseated idea that we derive much of our worth and our identity from our appearance. You can appreciate your body for what it does in training all you want, but until you learn to not think of your worth as remotely determined by how you look, you will not be fully able to appreciate yourself.

I went on a pretty crazy rant about this the other night. In advertisements leading up to the Ronda Rousey-Liz Carmouche UFC fight, Rousey was constantly promoted with the ridiculous rhetoric “she’s badass and beautiful” and similar. I sat there railing that “she’s a FIGHTER. I do not CARE what she looks like and it pisses me off that she’s being promoted for this FIGHT using her LOOKS. Does no one else see the incongruence here? No? Apparently not.”

You do things and you are proud of them and build a sense of self from this process. You have a body and you exist in a society in which people feel the freedom to assign far greater a meaning to its proportions, composition, and shape than its existence as a pile of marrow and muscle and fat really warrants. Embrace your body, yes, but think about how you are embracing it. The more you think about your body using the judgmental language–good or bad–used by the masses, the more you stay situated in the trap you seek to escape.

I admit that I get fatigued by the onslaught of images of the body pervasive even in women’s strength sports territory (to say nothing of physique competitors, which I’m going to go ahead and put in a separate category from the former in the context of my argument). I am very small and one group of individuals would probably laud my proportions while another would look at me as sub-par. I sometimes feel marginalized as a lifter because I am a rather spare, lengthily proportioned individual. And then I remember that I don’t have to accept ANYONE’S rhetoric regarding my physique and what it means or doesn’t mean. And I remember that cultural responses to my body have absolutely, utterly no bearing on how I perform in the gym. How I perform in the gym is my ultimate concern. How I perform in the gym is a far better illustration of my character than how my body is formed.