What I did over the weekend: I wandered into a powerlifting meet and took this picture
18 April 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
BEHOLD, A MAN! WITH A CAPITAL M!
Prototypical Purposefully Primitive Powerlifter plys Tadekraft
I dont even know this mans name. He readies his mind prior to his opening squat of 722-pounds. He hopes for much more than that on this special day. Wrapped and ready, his listens to a particular musical selection, one that holds special significance for him. His heart races as he wrestles with internal mental voices of negativity trying to sabotage him with whispers of doubt and fearfear of embarrassment, fear of injury, fear of failurehis righteous self, his Man Self tells him to push all fear and self-doubt out of his brain right now! Inside two minutes hell be squatting at an important regional competition. Hell lift on a sturdy wooden platform in front of three steely-eyed judges, each of whom will be looking to turn down his lift down for a dizzying array of technical infractionsfriends, family and training partners populate the audience and all await his lifting with great anticipation.
This man is an obvious Pro, and as Hunter S. Thompson once said, When the going gets tough, the weird turn pro. This man knows exactly what he needs to do: first he tells himself to act like a man. He conducts himself as he should in a pressure cooker situation. He controls his emotions through sheer willpower. You also have tricks-of-the-trade passed down from master to acolyteyou gain control of your breathing as this gives the mind something to do. The unoccupied mind is fertile ground for negative thoughts and emotions. You center yourself by listening hard to music. Not only do you control the audio environment but conversation is made impossible if one party is listening to a blazing I-POD. You declare a self-imposed ban on negative thoughts, if one arises, through iron-willed self-discipline that thought is forcibly shut down. When his name and it is his turn, he cinches his lifting belt, chalks his hand and at the last possible instant he lets slip all his pent up fury and strides forth.
John Goodie sighting
At the same powerlifting competition I had a chance to rendezvous with old friend John Goodie. John is on fire as a powerlifting and learning how to Olympic lift from scratch at age 45. He is closing in on national bench press records for his age group and weight class. John competes in drug-free competitions without a bench shirt. A bench shirt is an incidious garment that enables the wearer to bench press more than they are capable of. Way, way more.
John has blasted up 405 at barely over the 220-pound class limit. I predict a 450-bench for John Boy Walton in the foreseeable future. Well be running some photos of his Purposefully Primitive shed-gym that he built himself from the ground up. I gave John fifteen lifting tapes of every type and variety. He called an said he only got halfway through the Karwoski Tape, From Kadet to Kaptain when an uncontrollable urge to squat came over him and he had to shut down the VCR and run to the gym to hit ten sets of pause squats. As I took this picture I told him he looked like an escaped member of the Manson Family, he thought I meant The Munster Family.
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