My team is always working and playing hard on the platform so it is nice to do something completely different, and last Saturday we cheered on the Angel City Football Club.  If you have never heard of them, then you have been missing out because they are an amazing football (soccer) team! As I watched this game, my mind became filled with memories about the first women’s sporting event I ever went to, and what it took for these high-level female athletes to reach the pinnacle of their sport. It was mid-1997 and I was eagerly waiting for the pre-sale to open to buy tickets for a game that is now known as a watershed moment in U.S. women’s soccer and women sports in general.  With diligence it happened, and for many days thereafter I could not believe that I managed to get two tickets to the Final Game of...Read more

Weightlifting is a year-long sport unlike others that have seasons so it is important for our members, especially our competitive athletes to stay in top shape year-round.  We wanted to try something new last year with our members and decided to do a 6-week squat challenge to keep them engaged as we neared the end of the year.  The 6-week squat challenge would be a different training cycle that focused exclusively on the back squat and incorporating a lot of body building movement and accessory work to supplement the training.  Those that decided to do the challenge had to be okay with no Olympic lifts during those six weeks since the recovery time needed to do the squat cycle successfully wouldn’t really allow for much weightlifting to happen.  As a club, we’ve never completely removed the lifts from a training cycle, but we needed to experiment and figured that it...Read more

I had recently moved to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and as resident athletes we were expected to do more than just lift.  We could either go to school, work part time or volunteer if it did not impact training and performance.  I had been there for a few months, and it was mid-semester so I was not able to get into school right away, I was not working either and I had yet to volunteer for anything.  Plus, my reasoning for slacking off a bit too was that I was still adjusting to the additional training time, and I was also indulging being in my twenties and out of the house (and in another state) for the first time.  Work-life balance as they say, but my slack time had run out.  Earlier in the week our coaches mentioned that a few of us were going to be...Read more

The first time we moved to our own place was back in the Summer of 2016 and up until then I was coaching a few weightlifting classes in CrossFit gyms.  One thing I had to get used to was that they were always playing music.  Not to age myself too much, but when I started lifting in 1996 and throughout my entire lifting career (12 years) we never had music playing in any of the gyms I trained at.  So, moving into our place was exciting for many reasons, and one thing I was really looking forward to being in a bit more control of was the sound and volume in the room.     After a few weeks we had finally settled into our new place and my lifters started to ask me about getting a speaker so we could have some music in the room.  I cringed a little bit...Read more

I should have been home finishing up my marketing plan for one of my MBA classes that one Sunday in the Summer of 2013, but instead I chose to help my teammate Leslie with a mock meet she was running at a CrossFit gym she had been coaching a few weightlifting classes during the week.  I had also been coaching at a few CrossFit gyms myself, and a handful of those athletes were starting to compete, but we still didn’t have an official weightlifting club at that time, so we competed as “Unattached”.  So, I thought it was a cool idea to run a mock meet for people that wanted to start competing in weightlifting meets but needed a little extra preparation before becoming comfortable on the official stage and I knew then that I was going to start doing this with my athletes too. Leslie and I went all...Read more