October 12

Tired, Sick and The Luckiest Guy In The World (IPF RevFit Open Wrap Up)

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Starting this post, I typed out about 100 words on why I’m so exhausted and how physically and mentally tough the last couple of months have been for me. Then I deleted it all. Because me moaning doesn’t help you.

Besides, you’ll probably never know the extent of it anyway so it’d be pointless.

I’ve been up a 5 something AM every day since last Wednesday, and not got to bed before 11pm any of those nights, sometimes later. Right now I’m a shell, holding on by a thread, waiting in Dublin Airport to go to a coaching course in Spain.

“Tough life, James” you’re probably saying. And while I appreciate how great getting to go to Spain to ‘work’ is, I’d MUCH rather do it in Dublin. I’d much rather not having a 2 hour wait in the airport, 3 hours flight, and 1.5 hour transfer just to sit in an air conditioned hotel thousands of miles from home.

If I could do it in the Carlton Dublin Airport, I’d trade it in a heart beat.

But that’s not the point of today’s post. The point of today’s post is to talk about these guys…

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That’s the RevFit Powerlifting Team. 10 of them, including myself, competed in the Irish Powerlifting Federation’s RevFit Open last weekend (Sharon’s missing from the pic).

It’s only now, a few days later that I’ve the energy to sit down and write this post. The weekend was exhausting and pushed me over the edge from “really really tired” to “really really sick” – I’ve only got out of bed the last 2 days to coach and eat.

But I digress..

…and I don’t.

See with 100+ competitors over the course of 2 days, there was a lot of things that could have gone wrong at our first official powerlifting meet, something I’ve waited 10+ years to host.

We got “lucky” tho. All I’ve seen is great feedback about how amazing the venue was and how well set up everything ended up being. I’m very proud of that.

A lot of thought went into making it a good day for the lifters.

But what I’m MOST proud of from the weekend isn’t the lifting – it’s the team we’ve built. And the team starts with 2 keys members.

Luke Curran (back row left), and Eoin Small (front row left).They’re both coaches in RevFit, but on Friday they truly blew me away. See early last week my Aunt passed away. We weren’t sure when the burial was up until a day before, which meant the set up for the comp was going to be a massive stress since I possibly wouldn’t be there to do it.

(I wasn’t in the end – we said our goodbyes Friday morning)

But the lads dug in. And even though Luke was lifting on Saturday, he spent the entire day Friday with Eoin slinging chairs, banners and weights around to set everything up.

At one stage, during the funeral, I said to Sarah “I wonder how the lads are getting on – I haven’t heard from them all day”. And she asked would I not just call to check. My response was fairly simple; “if I haven’t heard anything from them I can assume one of two things – everything is being handled and I’ve nothing to worry about, or the shit’s hit the fan and I can’t do anything anyway”.

At that stage, I was 99.99% confident it was the former.

So, when I walked into the gym about 6pm on Friday night after arguing with a sign writer in town for an hour before, you can imagine my dread at the thought of setting everything up.

And then I walked in to this;

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…everything set up and good to go.

it doesn’t get much better than that.

Today’s mail basically boils down to 2 things…

One is me complaining about how tired and sick I am.

The other is my sheer and utter bemusement at how lucky I am to have such an incredible team of coaches and lifters around me.

(and this is all without mentioning the guys and girls who stayed behind cleaning up, and the Abs powerlifting crew who helped out too)

So now, I’ve gotta close the laptop because I’ve got a coaching course to go to.

And I close it a very very lucky and thankful guy.

Over the next few days I’ll be posting blogs and emails at the end of each day wrapping up what we’ve learned and how you can apply it to your training, and I’ll be sharing some more stories from the comp.

It’s gonna take me quite a while to get thru everyones performance!!!!!

TL;DR – tired, lucky, coaching course, powerlifting

(EDIT: Yes, I’ll be talking about the teams performance too, but I’m doing this chronologically, from start to finish, and to give everyone the credit they deserve, this will be a multi-parter)


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