I do not have pictures from this meet and you had to be super rich to even own a video camera. I am leaving images out of this post as it is longer than normal and I want to keep the format as easy to read as I can. There are some great lessons and a couple funny stories within this post.
My first meet ... My first competition was held in Canton, Ohio in 1983.
I can't recall the exact name of the meet, it was either the Canton Open or some other thing because it wasn't in Canton it was at a high school just outside the Canton area. It was a much bigger meet than what I thought, but I really didn't have any thoughts of what a meet was, I had nothing to compare it to because it was the first meet I ever did.
Unlike many other people, most of my training from the very beginning was powerlifting base. I had a very short stint, very short of just a few months of training in a friends garage, my garage, my basement, so forth. To which point my father noticed that I had a very strong interest in it and then got me associated with the Finley Barbell Club, which was a small powerlifting gym that was in town that was predominantly made up of powerlifters. I can't think of really anybody else in there, that wasn't a powerlifter. So it was a key club, very very small gym, I was by far the youngest person in there and probably was only in there as a favor being paid to my father by the owners or committee members that were there. They kind of took me under their wings to show me how to train, how to squat, how to bench, how to dead-lift.
It didn't take very long of training there for them to realize I was serious about what I was doing. I took it serious, I was committed to it, was there pretty much all the time and did way more than was asked. They weren't really designing programs for me so to say, I would find a program in Powerlifting USA and put it together or they would give suggestions and follow along or what not. After about six months, the suggestion was made that I train for and go to meet and that meet was going to be the Canton Open.
The thing with the meet is, as I noted, I didn't know what to expect, I had no idea. I didn't know anything about it, I had never seen a meet, I was never at a meet. They kind of explained to me how it worked, you were going to squat first, then you were going to bench, then you were going to dead-lift and more than likely I would be following myself, this was before the round system. So the bar was loaded at each flight and the weight would work up based upon attempts. So if you're the very bottom of the flight, you're the weakest guy in the flight, say you're going to open with 225pounds on the squat and then you're going to jump to 275 and then you're going to jump to 315 and then the next squat is going to be 405. Well then you're going to end up following yourself. It didn't come back around the way it does now, the bar was loaded and it worked up from that point.
Which was a different way of competing compared to the way they do now, it had it's advantages and it had it's disadvantages. The disadvantages is it really sucked if you fall in the very beginning or if you were the strongest lifter of the flight, because more than likely you follow yourself. If you fell in the middle, it wasn't so bad, it also sucked because you had a really hard time trying to know when you were going to be up next. It was hard to run a meet and figure out what the order was when using the process.
The biggest problem with the first meet was, training went well I wasn't really expecting a whole hell of a lot out of it, I just wanted to get something in the books to have a real max I guess. It was drilled into my head from the first day in the gym that you can say you bench whatever you bench but it doesn't mean shit unless you do it in a meet. So that's how I was brought into the sport and brought into this whole weight training realm, it doesn't matter what you lift if it's not done in a meet. It's just a gym lift and who cares? I wanted it to care, I wanted it to matter and on the flip side I was also told from the very beginning to not lift in any high school meets and I've never really understood why. I didn't really care one way or another, because I liked to be strong, I liked getting stronger. I was going to do basically whatever I was told to because they knew better than I did and I didn't find out until later on when I started helping some other people why to not do the high school meets.
To make a long story short, we're talking back in the 80s, I can't speak for how they are now or how they were after that, but they were nothing but just this huge giant cluster fuck, the judging was a disaster, people were wearing knee wraps for elbow wraps. A lot of the results were never sent in to Powerlifting USA, so it really didn't matter, it really didn't count. It was more just a sport for one school to compete against another school and it wasn't even an organized sport at the school that I was at. Basically it wasn't going to count and it wasn't going to be judged under any type of standard at all. I passed on it, I didn't even know what I was passing on until later. At the time is was just the US-PF and that's what it was.
Training went well for the meet, base the openers on what I could triple minus 40 pounds and that was for pretty much easy lifts. So we wanted to make sure the openers were going to be really really easy so I could go through the whole meet. Back then as well if you bombed out of the meet, you were done. There was no bombing out of the squat and you were still allowed to bench or you were still allowed to dead-lift. If you were going to travel up there to compete, the whole idea was to get the first meet under my belt and understand the experience and understand and learn from the meet. It doesn't do you any good to go and try to understand and learn from the meet if all you're going to do is squat and bomb out. You don't learn shit except that you shouldn't bomb out in the squat. You're giving up on two thirds if not more of the learning experience of being able to compete in a meet.
The road block I ran into with this was, about three days out from the meet, my ride bailed. The person who was going to take me up there couldn't do it and I was basically fucked. So I spent the next two days calling pretty much everybody that I knew that knew anything about powerlifting and the sport or trained in the gym to see if they would go. It was going to be about a three and a half hour drive, so it wasn't like I was asking for a real simple favor here, I was asking for somebody to drive a thirteen year old kid, a teenage kid, three and a half hours to spend who knows how many hours at the meet and then drive all the way back home. I was probably rejected or given at least twenty different excuses or nos.I completely understand why somebody would not want to do it on a two day notice before I finally found somebody to say yes.
That person was one of the police officers that did train in the club and wasn't really part of the whole clique, but he was one of the better lifters there, without a doubt one of the best lifters there. One of the lifters that I had probably more respect for than the other ones for his strength and he was also very humble, never bragged about anything, just let his strength speak for himself. I was extremely intimidated, just calling and asking him. It took a lot of nerve man, it was a teenage kid trying to call a girl asking her out for a date but ten times worse because the communication with him at the gym was always very limited, more him just suggesting, giving advice. I always took whatever advice he said because I had such high respects for him that I didn't want to make it look like I wasn't listening to him or trying to apply what he said. Most of the time anytime that he told me something it was dead on, it was right. I was extremely grateful for the fact that he was going to take me to this meet.
We started off early in the morning, I lived about three hours away, three and a half hours, maybe four hours away from where the meet site was. They were same day weigh ins, two hour weigh ins, we had to leave early, four-four thirty in the morning. So once again going to back to him offering to do this is something I look back on with gratitude. It's a big ask man, it's a big thing to do and so we left early got up to the meet, weighed in, I really wasn't too concerned with that. I was very light, 220, I probably could have cut to 198, but I didn't see the point it was my first meet. Once again I had great advice on this as well, there was no point in cutting weight even though I had a background in wrestling and was still wrestling at the time, I had no doubt in my mind that I couldn't make the weight, but this wasn't about making the weight, it was about the experience and learning the take-aways from the meet.
So got there, weighed in, went back to the warm up room and as we were walking into the warm up room, I realized that this was a big fucking meet. It was held in a high school gym, which you don't see anymore and it was a three platform meet. Back then it was more common than not, the warm up room was packed. I can't sit here and say that I knew any of the people that were back there, I kind of flipped through Powerlifting USA because there were piles of them in the gym, but I never really cared a whole lot to read the meet reports.. I was just looking at the work out of the month and stuff like that and trying to pick up things that might be able to help with my training, but at the same time, didn't want to pick up anything or to suggest anything that was going off a lot of the stuff that was already set up in a program for me to do because the one thing that I learned through wrestling the hard way, when you start to go off track is when really really start to become derailed.
I would accumulate the ideas and write it down in my training log as future things to try and kind of leave it at that. The closer that the meet came, the advice I was given was stop reading all that shit altogether. Just avoid it all and focus on your own training and making sure that you're getting depth, making sure you're getting clean lifts, making sure that your benches are paused and making sure that everything was solid. Focusing more on my own training instead of what everybody else was doing in regard to magazines and so forth.
It was later I realized how many big name lifters were at the meet; Louie Simmons (who actually gave me advice that day), Matt Dimmel, John Florio, John Black, Dave Jacoby, Dave Waddington, Steve Wilson, Vince Annello, Laura Dodd and many more.
We dropped my bag and went to the rules meeting and there was nothing there that I didn't really know because it was already explained to me before in the gym, it had been drilled into my head through the whole training cycle when I would train with these guys. I was also reminded on the drive-off, everything that was supposed to happen and the rules and all the other kind of stuff. I just remember how fucking big everybody was, everybody was fucking larger than life to me, it was awesome, it was not intimidating to me at all, it was just fucking awesome.
I remember sitting in a folding chair against a wall getting my shit together and looking around and feeling like I was in the right place, I didn't feel uncomfortable, I didn't feel out of place. I'm not going to say I felt home, I didn't feel home by any means whatsoever, but I didn't feel out of place where a lot of times throughout my younger life in sports, even if I was good at the sport, I never really felt like I was in place. Like it was a part of who I was or that I was supposed to be there or deserved to be there or should be there. This felt right, this felt like where I should be, what I should be doing.
The squats started and I was in the first flight and I think I ended up squatting 400 that day. I most certainly did squat and follow myself all three attempts. It was like a 350 squat, then I jumped to 400 and then I think to 415, somewhere in that range and then the next jump up was Laura Dine which always left an impression on me, because Laura was one of Louis' lifters at the time. All three of my squats are done and then a woman opened up, strong fucking woman I'm not going to deny that, she was a world champion and a great great lifter, it was also humbling to go from thinking you're a bad ass because you're the strongest guy in your high school to being the first one done squatting in a meet of over a couple hundred people, the person to squat after you was a female who weighed less than you did. It created a lasting impression on me for the sport and it wasn't a bad one, it was more along the lines of this is really fucking cool because it showed the potential of how strong somebody can be, that I really wasn't aware of. When you see the numbers in the magazine they're just numbers, they're not really realized in your brain. This was a realization and it was a big time realization.
Then the other flights of squats went and I remember seeing some huge squats, I think the one I remember the most is Matt Dimmel squatted a thousand pounds that day, I could be wrong it could have been in the high 900s, but it was a fucking lot of weight and he was the last guy to squat and it was amazing to watch. Other lifters I remember watching that day were Jim Cash, John Black, John Florio, Dave Jacoby, and others noted earlier. They were some of the guys I was reading about in a Powerlifting USA.
Most of them weren't going for big numbers, they were just qualifying for the nationals or in some cases they were just guess lifting. It was cool to watch them lift because it reinforced the importance of technique because the one thing I noticed was all of their technique was just rock solid compared to a lot of the other lifters that were at the meet whose technique was just kind of all over the place.
This was being pointed out to me by the guy you brought me up to the meet as well, to spend time looking at the differences between the guys lifting at the end of the flight compared to the guys lifting at the beginning of the flight and looking at the technique and see what the commonalities were among those. Instead of him telling me, look for this, this, this and this, he was making me look to see what the commonalities were. Later on the way home we discussed what they were and some of the other things I may have missed.
Moving onto the bench press, it was a better experience because I had a strong bench press and I benched I think 400 that day. I'm not going to say I was at the top of the pack, but I was not in the bottom of the pack, I didn't follow myself which was cool. I was at least out benching somebody. That was good and then on the dead-lift, once again I was following myself and ended up pulling about the same as what I squatted. Not a spectacular total and that wasn't really the point because when you have no total to begin with, or competitive total, then there is no total. So there is no such thing as a PR total or a spectacular total, there's just establishing a starting point which was the point of the whole meet.
Some of the things I still remember that were from that meet were a lot of these guys, Louis Simmons and a lot of the other ones were all complimentary. Not all, but a lot of them would come up and tell me good lift and it was just cool because you don't see that camaraderie in other sports. Like I wrote before, I felt I was where I was supposed to be and some of them, Louis I remember pointed out a couple things to me, one of them was in regards to my bench press, my elbows were way way out wide and explaining leg drive to me in a way that I was able to understand, he didn't have to do that. I mean I was just a fucking snot nosed thirteen year old kid and he did, I'm so grateful for that, I've never forgotten that, I've never forgotten any of these guys any of their suggestions or encouragement they gave. These are the same guys, a lot of these guys, John Florio was another one I would see at all these meets. If I had a question they always had an answer for me, they always had advice and encouragement. It was great, it was a great part of the sport.
One weird ass funny thing, one of the more popular lifters at the time after the meet was over, it was in a high school, I've got chalk and sticking spray and all this other crap all over me and I wanted to shower before heading back and I didn't want to stink up this dudes car. It was late, we probably left there at ten o'clock at night and we had a long way to go home so I didn't want to smell up his car. So I go to jump in the shower, and one of the more prominent lifters at the time, was in the shower at the same time, dude's in there with his cowboy boots on. Being a young red neck myself I thought it was the coolest fucking thing in the world, you know he's in there showering, lathering up and he's still got his fucking cowboy boots on. To this day I have no idea why, nor do I care, but it was fucking awesome, it cracked me up. Big jacked mother fucker too.
I also remember one of the guys at a meet, I don't remember the name, and if I did I probably would tell you on this one. Some of the others I don't want to mention names. This dude whacked his head on the bar when so hard when he squatted, fucking blood was shooting all over the place, I thought that was the coolest fucking thing in the world. He go up in the squat, his face his nose was bleeding, blood was coming out of his mouth, his eyes were just fucking bloodshot, it was the coolest thing ever. It's probably the reason I ended up doing the same thing here later, it was awesome.
I remember that and I remember the judging, the squats, fucking hated it. The judging was just super strict, I mean you think you squat deep until you go to a meet and you train deep, keep in mind I'm going back to 83 here so I'm not talking about standards today or standards over the past ten years. In the gym we worked the fuck out of trying to squat deep and you go to a meet and you put that thing down there and you come up and still get a red light. In the past I got two white lights, what the fuck is a red light for? I asked the coach who was coaching me what the red light was for, and he said it was depth and I didn't understand, there's no fucking way I can squat any deeper than I'm currently squatting. You had to adapt and next time make sure that that wasn't the case.
The drive home was all about powerlifting, what did I observe, what did I see, what would I change, how did the training cycle go, what things in the cycle could be improved, what was a technique I saw, what are the differences in the technique? It was a huge forecast into what my future in the sport was going to be like because after that first meet, most of the time I went to compete it was usually with the guys that I trained with. At that point in time there wasn't really any younger guys that I was training with, they were all older guys. After I competed some younger guys started training, but they might do a meet and then leave. It was frustrating because I took this very serious so I'd try to keep training partners that would at least fucking hang for a year or so so there was something to grow off of and energy to derive from, but at the same time I had to have somebody there because you needed spotters and I needed somebody to get my straps up.
That was actually another thing I learned from the first meet was, you're required to wear a one piece lifting suit so I remember asking the guys in the gym, can I just wear my wrestling singlet? Hell no, you can't wear that, you have to wear a lifting singlet. I'm like what the fuck is a lifting singlet? So I had to order a squat suit - used for both the squat and dead. I also used it for my bench. I ordered my measurements that were my measurements and I may have even added an inch to it just because of my ego and I wanted my legs to be an inch bigger. So the suit didn't do a whole lot for me, I could put it on myself, I pulled the straps up myself. I learned at that meet, I'm starting to see three four people getting other people in the suits and I'm seeing some people where the suits are blowing out in the ass. I'm thinking what the fuck am I wearing, my suit is going on like a wrestling singlet. I remember it being explained to me that these are supposed to be tight, very tight, they help keep your body tight and help you lift a little more weight. It would have been nice if someone had told me that!
After that meet I bought another suit, you know being a kid you gotta save your allowance for a month to be able to save up and buy another suit. I did have a dish washing job so it took weeks to earn the money, but I was able to buy another suit and it was tighter. It helped, it made a difference, it didn't make a hundred pound difference, but it definitely made a difference. I can't lie, I loved the way it felt!
My training then changed because you would spend so many weeks training with raw basically just shorts, then four weeks with shorts and wraps, and then suit, straps down with wraps and then suits, straps up with wraps and then on to the meet. As you were progressing through your training cycle you would add more equipment as the cycle went on.
I had to have training partners at a certain point in time because I couldn't get the straps up. I do remember there were a number of occasions where there was a drug store across the street from the gym and I would have to walk over, waddle over to the drug store to have the lady who was working the counter pull the straps of my suit up and then go back over and have her pull them back down again, which is funny to think about now, but you did what you had to do.
One of the things I remember looking back now, that I did, I always found a way to do what I had to do to get it done. That's a recap of my first meet, there were a ton of things that I learned from it, most importantly was that this was a sport I really wanted to be a part of and embraced it and kind of took it from there.