Masters Nationals 2015 – Passover, PRs and PMS

Despite it’s being over a week past, I am just now sitting down to write up my experience at this year’s masters national championships.  I apologize for the delay, but I went straight from nationals to a week long trauma job (hooray!) which kept me too busy to contemplate lifting (gasp!).

So many things were challenging going into this year’s meet.  Passover started 7 days before.  For those of you not familiar with the Jewish holiday, it celebrates the exodus from slavery in Egypt.  Which is lovely except it’s celebrated by NOT eating leavened bread.  Fleeing pharoah’s wrath meant grabbing dough before it had a chance to rise and getting the hell out of Dodge. Or Cairo as the case may be.

Lovely, but anybody who knows me knows I eat a lot of leavened stuff.  Donuts.  Fig Newtons.  PB&J sandwiches.  This holds especially true after weigh-in.  I don’t live very much above my weight class, maybe a kg or two, so making weight means cutting back salt and carbs for a few days and limiting water the day before competition.  Right after weigh-in, the re-feed begins with lots of simple carbs (Newtons!) and Monster.

But what was different on this day vs. all other days (you’ll get the reference if you’ve ever been to a seder)?  No Newtons.  No Lenny&Larry cookies.  No Pop Tarts.  And none of those yummy carby treats to fuel up after the preceding week’s workouts.  Ugh.  I think I ate my weight in matzah brie and matzah cashew butter and jelly sandwiches.

Now add challenge #2.  This was PMS week.  So I retained water like a sea sponge on Mercury.  Not good for making weight.  It also meant that forgoing the donuts was extra hard because donuts and PMS go together like, well, donuts and PMS.

Challenge #3.  I wafted into Monrovia on a cloud of Advil and Aleve trying to nurse what I could out of an extremely painful shoulder injury.

All in all, I was nervous.

But guess what? I won.  By 1kg, but I won.  And I did well-ish.

I missed my first snatch for a little re-bending of my inured arm (I can hear Nick Horton yelling at me to LOCK OUT even as I write this).  So I went out and locked the living shit out of snatches two and three.  But alas that meant re-trying my opener which meant I didn’t get to try my super big third attempt.  No biggie, went into cleans 3kg ahead.  And I hit my 40kg snatch which was my dream lift not that long ago.

We went lift for lift in the clean and jerk though, with her opening bigger than I did.  So it came down to each of our last lifts.  I had wanted to do and think I could have jerked 53kg.  But to be safe I needed to make  54kg so that’s what I tried.  The clean was kind of ugly, but I made it.  But then missed the jerk.  She went out to do 54kg, made the clean (prettier than I did truth be told) then missed the jerk.

And that’s the moment that I became a two-time Masters National Champion.

I PRed my total.  I beat last year’s total by 14kg.  FOURTEEN KG!!! I PRed my competition snatch, although I’ve done better in training.  I PRed my competition clean.  I matched my recent competition jerk.  And my singlet totally rocked.

I’m pretty ecstatic really.  And now I’m all kinds of fired up to go to Dallas in August for the Masters World Cup and see if I can hit a triple digit total.  I have amazing coaches, I have a super supportive team and I have goals.

And I once again have donuts.  Yee haw!!!

Next year…… threepeat.