By Chris Ryan

Today I travelled down to Crystal Palace to compete in the London & South East Weightlifting last chance qualifier.

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).