bench press qualifier

There’s a bench press competition this Friday, but I can’t participate in it because I will be flying across the country to attend my hopefully-last interview for med school. (This is my tied-for-first-choice med school, although if I’m to be honest, I’m leaning toward the one I’ve already been accepted to. Its only real downside is that it’s far from all the people I love and care about, and the people I most enjoy spending my time with.)

But, back to this bench press competition. I was pretty devastated that I’d have to miss it (that and Soupervan’s official grand opening! ;_; ), but I decided to go for the qualifier anyway, just for fun. (That was last Friday.)

Here are my disclaimers:
1) It’s actually been a pretty long while since I’ve lifted weights regularly, largely because I spent the summer cheating on lifting weights with pole dancing. The fact that I’ve been a basement/study-room-dwelling drone trying to learn theough osmosis for the past several weeks really doesn’t help either.
2) Bench press is my absolute worst “event” (out of deadlifts, squats and bench press).
3) It’s generally not the best of ideas to lift weights at a 3:30 pm competition when you’ve been up since 7 am, are running on 4 hours of sleep, a bowl of oatmeal, an apple, and some almonds.

For the record, this was the last qualifier for lightweight (<130 lbs) females (you just need to do 6 reps at 50% BW). The most anyone has done so far is 23, which I did last Monday, but I only managed to do 20 on Friday. :[ I completely blame cell bio and the aforementioned disclaimers.) All the rest did 6-7 reps.

This is really all just to justify why I didn’t do as many as I believe I normally could. :[ I was pretty disappointed in myself because this is the weight I was doing less than 2 weeks after I first started lifting. In my head, doing only 20 is somewhat of a fail, although truth be told, it’s not like I’ve been training for/have ever trained for it or anything. :[

However, the guy counting my reps is apparently the head of the Olympic weightlifting gym on campus that I still have yet to get myself to (this week, mark my words.) When I told him I couldn’t be there this Friday (I told the registration people too and asked of I could just do the qualifier for fun; I’m kinda honest to a fault), he told me to email him after this week and he’d get me a finalist t-shirt. ;] ;] ;] hells yes!

I got a free t-shirt! :D