By Chris Ryan

Today I travelled down to Crystal Palace to compete in the London & South East Weightlifting last chance qualifier as the only representative of the club. We usually would have more people competing but our other lifters were either engaged in the match against the Germans, were carrying injuries or simply did not get their entries in on time.

I weighed in at 94.25kg which is the lightest I’ve been for a long time. At my last competition in March I was 101.7kg.

Snatch

My planned opener was 75kg. I snatched 83kg in training last week so was hoping to surpass that today. I warmed up comfortably to 75kg with no misses on the way which got me feeling confident.

My first attempt on 75kg was a complete disaster; it looked completely different to my warmups and ended up going behind me.

The second attempt was much the same and ended up behind.

The pressure was on now but luckily I got my act together and hit 75kg on my third and final attempt, sparing me from my first bomb out!

Clean and Jerk

Planned opener was 100kg here. I got 107.5kg recently in training and I was feeling confident of more in the tank. I went up to 100 in the warmup room which was comfortable enough although not perfect.

100kg – three whites for this, easy enough.

108kg – The clean was a bit tougher but again, three white lights were granted. This was a PB for me (both in training and in competition).

114kg – failed on the clean.

I ended up with a 183kg total @ 94.25kg bodyweight which is also a PB. My thanks go out to Hamza for the coaching and to Diane for the expert filming of (most of) my lifts.

Below is a video of my attempts from the day (minus the third snatch).