Sunday 27 June 2010

Saturday's sloppy slip up

I was away on holiday for a week and I got back home at around three thirty on Saturday morning. The Leinster Open was on a few hours later in Crossfit Ireland and it was great fun, but my lifting was not the Mae West--108/132 which is roughly 90% of my best. I had not touched a bar in nine days and I was finding it quite difficult to focus my mind. I still enjoyed myself though and was happy to see everyone again. I am really looking forward to the next two months where I can train to my heart's content and continue setting up and establishing East Coast Barbell. By the way, I am setting up an ECB youtube account and will publish my four part interview with John Broz on it and switch over a few of my other interviews also. Here is the first part of John's interview:




I have talked about Pat a few times now, but I have neglected to discuss his training partner. Rob Adell is a 94kg lifter who is training with the Average Broz club; he is around 97kg and is about 5"7 in height. I have never met anyone like him physically: he is like a mutant shark in human form. The man is a perfect fit for the 94kg class and with his background of heavy lifting since he was 12 and his lifestyle, weightlifting is a match made in heaven. The first assumption that jumps to mind is that he is using, but when you realise his lifestyle and fanatical devotion to nutrition, my opinion evolved.


Rob is only 19 and he does not drink, smoke or eat junk food of any kind. So when people jump on the bandwagon and assume him and Pat are using, they are using a mind set that is completely alien to both athletes. People cannot understand their lifting and this means they try and work out in their minds how THEY could do it and gear is the only way they can imagine it. Of course I will not preach how these guys are using steroids or not, but what people need to understand is that there are far more important things to understand. The problem is that Pat's and Rob's brains do not work like ours. In Average Broz gymnasiun, Rob's lifting is treated as a tragic Greek drama: so much potential that has come nowhere near realised due to the main protaganist's conscious decision to ignore the calling of fate. Neither Rob or anyone else in the gym are anywhere even remotely satisfied with his lifts. Now that Rob has decided to focus on lifting and not football, we will see his results sky rocket.

When he was 17 years old he had Cleaned either 180kg or slightly less after little over a year of training. Himself and Pat started training at the same time and Rob was actually making better progress than Pat, but he was still playing football and actually hardly training with John for about a year. He is back and we will be hearing a lot more about him soon. In an interview I will show when Blogger stops being a stubborn 8 year old girl who just got her first Barbie taken off her on Christmas day so that she will eat her dinner, he was so tired from his week's training that he was practically a walking zombie and was not nearly as articulate as he would be normally. I will put up the rest of John's interviews over the next few days.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

John comes across very well here.

Barry you are becoming the Michael Parkinson of weightlifting!


DW

Anonymous said...

love your interviews...

question:

Is Rob Adell playing football for the Rebels this year or is he lifting full time with eyes on 2012?

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