A Weight Off My Shoulders
The buzzer sounds. The small crowd goes quiet. One minute. I try to quiet my mind. As I step out, I can hear a few shouts of encouragement, I appreciate these, but I find myself blocking them out. I’m focused, emptying out everything but one or two cues from my coach. I take a few steps to the platform. I stomp my feet, crouch down, and place my hands on the barbell. Trust in the process. Believe and execute. Buzzer sounds. Thirty seconds, it’s go time. This is my meditation, this is Olympic weightlifting, this is what brings me joy.
Olympic weightlifting involves picking up a heavy weight on a barbell and putting it above your head. There are two ways to do this, a lift called the snatch, that sees you do so in one fluid movement, and the clean and jerk, where by you lift to the shoulders first and then follow-up by putting it overhead.
As a sport it has been a staple of the modern day Olympic Games since 1896. I’m no where near being an Olympian.. I do this purely for fun, but my first experience of my sport was at the London 2012 Olympics. It was the women’s 58kg category. I’d been hoping to see home hopeful, Zoe Smith, but a mix up meant I had tickets for the A group, and there I was watching lifter after lifter hoist up more than twice their bodyweight above their heads. It was remarkable, like watching superheroes with super strength. The power, the grace the effort – it was epic.
A few years later, in 2017, I see an advert for an intro course in East London, I decide to give it a twirl. What I learnt that day was that Olympic weightlifting was not just about raw strength, but about combining this with movement and technique. This fascinated me. You needed flexibility and mobility – things I had lost after two decades of sedentary office work.
Since that day, Olympic weightlifting has become a key part of my life and it has given me a huge boost of energy and inspiration. I train with the Strength Ambassadors team in West Ham a few times a week and I compete in local, regional and national competitions as a masters athlete and my dream would be to compete at a European masters level (which is for older athletes from aged 35 to 100+).
Olympic weightlifting has given me routine and taken me down new paths to embrace the movement and flexibility it requires – from bringing be back to yoga (itself another reason to be cheerful) and in lockdown, joining in with Mark’s QiGang.
So, what about the sport gives me joy?
It’s meditative
That moment, when you walk onto the platform, it’s just you, the bar and three judges to impress. There’s two outcomes, you lift it, or you don’t. It’s that simple. Just for a moment, you have to blank out all the noise in the room… but also everything else that’s going on in your life. For me, it’s a moment of clarity, a moment to escape. For a minute, everything else is on pause. It’s such a rare and precious thing.
It’s a craft
Olympic weightlifting is skill-based, once you have the basics you’ll be working on them for years to master it, and few ever perfect it (they tend to win gold at the Olympics). To me it’s like any craft, you learn by doing, iterating, reflecting and learning each time. It has it’s highs when you surprise yourself and lift a weight you’ve never lifted before. It has it’s lows and can also be infuriating, frustrating when you struggle to lift something your head says should be easy or your feeling a bit beaten up by heavy training. But that’s the journey, and the search to be better and become stronger keeps you going. Like any craft – it’s a wonderful rollercoaster of emotions.
It’s a community
Although you compete individually, I’ve met a wonderful community through the sport. I train with great coaches and an awesome training group who are great fun but share the love of this craft. One thing that’s struck me has been the camaraderie between older, masters lifters. Weightlifting is a wonderful leveller, whatever your age, experience, size or shape, you are trying to do the same thing… There’s a hundred reasons to stop lifting as you get older and make more sensible choices, but every masters lifter defies this and inspires me by stepping on to the platform again and again, heart set on raising the bar.
Jon Khoo