My 15 seconds of sporting fame
I feature prominently in an article about weightlifting from last Friday's Guardian.
Which will go some way to answering the question "So what on earth have you been doing since you last posted, Fiona?" I think I have talked here at least once about how compelling I find Olympic weightlifting (i.e. the particular two styles of lift that feature in the Olympics). You can see the athlete's face through the entire procedure, and that procedure looks so difficult, and so painful. Whenever there is Olympic weightlifting on TV - either in the Olympics or in the Commonwealth games - I will be on the edge of my seat as I binge-watch.
I first stumbled across the sport while channel-hopping during the 2012 London Olympics. I did wish I could have tried the sport out, since I was curious about how it worked and I also gathered that it was one of the few sports where my squat build would be an advantage. However, at 48 I was obviously too old to go anywhere near it. And older still this summer while watching the Birmingham Commonwealth Games. But this time I got more and more bothered by how many of the points in the commentary I was missing because I didn't have personal experience of trying to do those lifts, and I started wondering how a person who wasn't 40 years too old for it might go about trying out Olympic weightlifting. I'd already googled the main commentator, Michaela Breeze, and on further exploration of her website, I saw she did weightlifting training camps at her home in Wales - and in the testimonials there was one from a woman in her 50s who had only just started weightlifting.
So if it wasn't out of the question after all, could I make a start somewhere closer to home? A couple of days of inefficient googling later, I came across Strength Ambassadors gym in West Ham (a few stops away on the Jubilee Line). They do both a 2-hour introductory workshop and a 6-lesson beginner's course, and the boss Sally thought the course would be more suitable for me, since I had no gym experience of any kind. The first class was on the 7th of September, with 2 lessons a week over three weeks. There were three of us in the class, with the other 2 post-graduate students in their early 20s who were immediately handling at least twice the weight that I was - but everyone was super-supportive and encouraging, and I just loved getting my body to do all of these new things, even when the first class left me so stiff that it was four days before I could walk downstairs without wincing. It's a small, women-dominated gym, and so welcoming.
The gym has four regular Olympic weightlifting classes every week, and also powerlifting classes (including a women-only beginner's class), and strongman/strongwoman classes. The beginner's course included attending one of the regular classes, and then I signed up for a trial month, which allowed me to attend any number of classes, so I did two Olympic classes each week and also the beginner's powerlifting class (because I was curious about the lifts and had also met the coach in the Olympic classes and really liked her). That ended about three weeks ago and now I am just a regular gym citizen on a package with one class a week, but in the meantime I've joined the large commercial gym just across the road from my flat and have been going there several times a week to try to build up my strength. I seem likely to be the weakest person in any given Strength Ambassadors class for some time to come, but I'm fine with that as I'm making progress, making friends and enjoying collecting aches and bruises in new places.
Regarding the Guardian article, the author Joel contacted Sally at the end of October to ask if there were any women at the gym who has started lifting late in life, by which he meant after the age of 35! For the purposes of the article, he particularly wanted to know what had been stopping them getting involved before, and what had pushed them over these barriers. So Sally thought of me, and a few weeks later Joel and I talked on the phone for about 20 minutes. I had no idea he would be leading the article with me, and I was very happy with the quotes he used and the way he used them.
So that's been taking up a lot of my time in the last few months. I'm hoping things will settle down into a manageable routine in the new year and I get a few more evenings to myself to knit and watch rubbish and maybe even post here more regularly. Today I was booked to see a free showing of Fanny and Alexander at Picturehouse Central at 2.30 pm, but last night I realised I really did not want to go into the West End two weekends before Christmas to watch a 3 hour film, and instead I treated myself to a day at home to write this, and also to finally sort out the photos from my short walking holiday in Jersey in early October, and remember that I also hadn't posted about the walking holiday on Dartmoor from July.
Which will go some way to answering the question "So what on earth have you been doing since you last posted, Fiona?" I think I have talked here at least once about how compelling I find Olympic weightlifting (i.e. the particular two styles of lift that feature in the Olympics). You can see the athlete's face through the entire procedure, and that procedure looks so difficult, and so painful. Whenever there is Olympic weightlifting on TV - either in the Olympics or in the Commonwealth games - I will be on the edge of my seat as I binge-watch.
I first stumbled across the sport while channel-hopping during the 2012 London Olympics. I did wish I could have tried the sport out, since I was curious about how it worked and I also gathered that it was one of the few sports where my squat build would be an advantage. However, at 48 I was obviously too old to go anywhere near it. And older still this summer while watching the Birmingham Commonwealth Games. But this time I got more and more bothered by how many of the points in the commentary I was missing because I didn't have personal experience of trying to do those lifts, and I started wondering how a person who wasn't 40 years too old for it might go about trying out Olympic weightlifting. I'd already googled the main commentator, Michaela Breeze, and on further exploration of her website, I saw she did weightlifting training camps at her home in Wales - and in the testimonials there was one from a woman in her 50s who had only just started weightlifting.
So if it wasn't out of the question after all, could I make a start somewhere closer to home? A couple of days of inefficient googling later, I came across Strength Ambassadors gym in West Ham (a few stops away on the Jubilee Line). They do both a 2-hour introductory workshop and a 6-lesson beginner's course, and the boss Sally thought the course would be more suitable for me, since I had no gym experience of any kind. The first class was on the 7th of September, with 2 lessons a week over three weeks. There were three of us in the class, with the other 2 post-graduate students in their early 20s who were immediately handling at least twice the weight that I was - but everyone was super-supportive and encouraging, and I just loved getting my body to do all of these new things, even when the first class left me so stiff that it was four days before I could walk downstairs without wincing. It's a small, women-dominated gym, and so welcoming.
The gym has four regular Olympic weightlifting classes every week, and also powerlifting classes (including a women-only beginner's class), and strongman/strongwoman classes. The beginner's course included attending one of the regular classes, and then I signed up for a trial month, which allowed me to attend any number of classes, so I did two Olympic classes each week and also the beginner's powerlifting class (because I was curious about the lifts and had also met the coach in the Olympic classes and really liked her). That ended about three weeks ago and now I am just a regular gym citizen on a package with one class a week, but in the meantime I've joined the large commercial gym just across the road from my flat and have been going there several times a week to try to build up my strength. I seem likely to be the weakest person in any given Strength Ambassadors class for some time to come, but I'm fine with that as I'm making progress, making friends and enjoying collecting aches and bruises in new places.
Regarding the Guardian article, the author Joel contacted Sally at the end of October to ask if there were any women at the gym who has started lifting late in life, by which he meant after the age of 35! For the purposes of the article, he particularly wanted to know what had been stopping them getting involved before, and what had pushed them over these barriers. So Sally thought of me, and a few weeks later Joel and I talked on the phone for about 20 minutes. I had no idea he would be leading the article with me, and I was very happy with the quotes he used and the way he used them.
So that's been taking up a lot of my time in the last few months. I'm hoping things will settle down into a manageable routine in the new year and I get a few more evenings to myself to knit and watch rubbish and maybe even post here more regularly. Today I was booked to see a free showing of Fanny and Alexander at Picturehouse Central at 2.30 pm, but last night I realised I really did not want to go into the West End two weekends before Christmas to watch a 3 hour film, and instead I treated myself to a day at home to write this, and also to finally sort out the photos from my short walking holiday in Jersey in early October, and remember that I also hadn't posted about the walking holiday on Dartmoor from July.