Confidence Builds

This past weekend I competed in my third Olympic weightlifting meet at Woodward CrossFit. I didn't set any PR's, but my confidence is growing. Enough so that in January I will be competing in the Texas State Championship meet in Alvin, Texas. It will be my second sanctioned meet and worlds different than my first one.

When I competed in my first sanctioned meet this past January I choked....bad. I have dedicated myself to the Olympic lifts and training for them only for almost a year. With some coaching by Olympian Chad Vaughn, I had finally built up enough confidence in my lifts to start competing. I had one other meet early on in the summer and did fairly well, no PR's but hit all my lifts. So, I got my USAW card and signed up for a meet at 210 CrossFit in San Antonio. I picked an opening weight that I had regularly hit while training and went for it. And then I scratched on all three attempts at 85 kilos. Not my brightest moment in the world of Olympic weightlifting.

After my poor showing I decided I need a full time coach and looked to Ursula Garza for guidance. She was gracious enough to accept me into her tight nit training group, and so my training began. If your not familiar with Ursula she is a stud! A former lifter herself, trainer for the CrossFit Olympic lifting certs. and a former U.S.A. record holder in the clean and jerk. Stud! She pretty much started me over with HEAVY focus on the snatch. Since it is the most technical of the two lifts it only makes sense that we spent the most time on the snatch. We drill, drill, and drill and then do hang snatch. Lot's of hard work. BUT! it is starting to pay off. When I first started training with Ursula I could only snatch 90kilos, and clan and jerk 120kilos. Just two weeks ago while training at Central I snatched 102kilos and cleaned and jerked 125kilos. Like I said, paying off!

At the meet this past weekend I snatched 98kilos with no straps and just missed 100. I cleaned and jerked 120kilos with ease and just missed 125. Not PR's but consistently making my attempts and getting stronger. Which leads me to going to the state meet in January where I will go for new PR's in the snatch and clean and jerk.
Seeing the progress I'm making and recognizing all the hard work I have been putting in is only feeding the fire inside. All of the workouts and sacrificing my free nights with my family to go get coached is not going to be for nothing. I have big goals for myself and am visualizing myself getting there. I have video of the lifts from this past weekends meet and should have it up next week for all to view. Happy lifting!

Ladies of Oly Lifting Crushin' It!

Several weeks ago Crossfit Central had an all women's challenge called the Iron Belle. There were two divisions, the fun division and the competitive division. The ladies in the pic below are the top three teams of the competitive division winners. I am very proud to say that two of the ladies on the 1st place team are athletes that I coach.
Claudia in the front right and Alexis peeking her head out in the back. These two ladies attend the evening Red Black Olympic Lifting class and come to extra training on Sundays. They have elevated there game and are true competitors. I also want to give a shout out to Stephanie who also is in the same Olympic Lifting class as Claudia and Alexis and competed in the fun division. During the competition she earned a new dead lift PR and rocked the house. She is the young lady pictured in my previous post performing the back squat beautifully.
One more shout out to Claudia who is also one of CrossFit Central's Diesel Athletes. I feel privileged to coach these ladies, and to watch their progress makes me very proud.
Congratulations girls! Now we need to get you all into an Olympic Lifting meet!

One last thing to let everyone know. This weekend I will be competing in my first sanctioned USAW Olympic Lifting competition in San Antonio. Since most of you know that read my blog or follow me on Twitter my passion lies with Olympic Lifting. I pretty much exclusively train Olympic Lifting and now want to see how I fare against other athletes that have the same passion as me. I will be wearing a singlet for the first time since high school power lifting. For those of you that aren't familiar with it you can check it out here. I don't think I'll be making that face though, I hope. I will be tweeting out how I'm doing and will have video and pics of the competition so be on the look out for that. I also want to give a big thanks to 210 Crossfit for putting on the competition.