Sunday, December 6th. Waukesha, Wisconsin. NX Level Sports Performance.
“Is this the platform you are going to use?” I look Jake Mason up and down. I made my way down to the far end of the platforms where we had watched Joey compete the day before. Today, though, Jake would be competing here. He’s wearing a thick, grey crew neck sweatshirt and tights. Nodding, he stands up from his make-shift chair of pulling blocks to center himself on it the wooden planks.
“Yeah, I think Nate said he wanted to use this one, so I’ll just go here, too,” he holds his hands over head, as if he just stood up his first snatch, “to make it easy”.
I nod, setting my tripod down, removing my heavy bag from my shoulders. I pull out my EOS R and screw it into place on the quick-release head. I look up to Rolo, a member of the MKE crew, setting up a table. It was a collapsable thing; made from slats of metal, held together by ropes and placed on top of a precarious set of legs.
“We aren’t messing around today, are we?”
“I don’t fuck around,” Rolo says, chuckling to himself. It’s true; this set up is far more sophisticated than the previous day’s. The laptop set up was the same: A open screen with web cam facing the platform Jake will be lifting on. Where before it was placed on a set of pulling blocks, it now rests on Rolo’s portable table, set just in front of the blocks. Behind it, facing the opposite direction on top of the pulling blocks, is a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
Rolo is connecting these components to the laptop when the fearless leader of MKE Barbell, Jake Derse, strolls into the gym with a cooler filled with three different kinds of cold brewed coffee. He sets the open cooler in front of me, along with a sleeve of red Solo cups. “Just don’t spill,” he says before strolling over to the blocks to help Rolo get the rig all set.
. . .
Jake has competed, finishing the day out with a PR total; although his numbers were not where he wanted them to be. Everyone else, save him, his girlfriend and me have left to get SubWay; a trip that Nate promises to be necessary.
No one argues this.
“I feel like getting some pulls in,” he says, shrugging the blanket from his shoulders. He walks up to the bar of the 163 kilos and brings it to his hips. He had missed the jerk only a few minutes before, but feels the energy that caffeine so generously gave him still coursing through his system. In time, he makes his way over to the dumbbells.
The crew often jokes of how Jake is the best looking of them all. While I couldn’t confirm this, I have no qualms in saying that the man is jacked. Derse and I chide him for be Adonis.
It doesn’t take long for the rest of the team to return, sandwiches in hand. Nate finds himself stretched out on a bench, jotting down his notes for his attempts. The rest of us gather around the monitor that Derse and Nate were using to count, make declarations, and watch Jake’s session.
It’s the battle of the 76’s; undoubtedly the most anticipated session of the weekend.
After it ends and shouts are heard echoing against the high ceilings, we all seem to find ourselves more reserved; mirroring Nate’s demeanor.
. . .
Nate is an interesting man.
I say that not as an insult or compliment; simply an observation.
He detests social media. He rarely watches television. He trains, he works, he coaches, he drinks coffee.
He’s just him.
And he’s preparing for his first snatch attempt.
There was a technical stop just before he was going to grab the bar. Now, with the wait, he is pacing.
He holds his hands down to his sides, lifting his elbows. Then, he aggressively turns his wrists and punches up, mimicking the snatch.
“Fuck,” he whispers, taking a few paces. “Fuck.”
He walks around a weight machine, finding a place to slam his head into the smooth, cold metal.
“Fuck.”
He walks away from snatches with 150 kilos on his second attempt.
As Nate tries to chill out and the bar is taken down to 70 kilos, I walk over to the assortment of coffee and pour a glass that I accidentally tip over.
I look up to Derse, “I had one job”.
. . .
Clean and jerks were different.
“Bring on the violence” he says, and Logan Gruber nods.
“Disturbed?”
“The violence.”
“I’ll get it on the ipod,” Logan walks towards the speaker, queuing up the song “Down with the Sickness”.
Clean and jerks didn’t go his way, and he wound up with a 175 kilo lift on his second attempt, with “Stupify” blasting through the speakers.
The clean up was swift as we all scramble to vacate the gym. Nic, the owner of NX Level, comes in and helps us reassemble the space.
We stand outside for a few minutes, allowing the cold winds to bite through the layers of cotton and polyester until it becomes too much.
Mason, Derse and I are the last men standing. We are talking real estate and where the winds will likely take us in the coming years. But for now, the winds have plans of returning the two Jakes to Milwaukee. And for me; they were tiding towards OshKosh. Or, I guess, Omro.
. . .
Omro, Wisconsin. Mary’s Garage.
There is one major up-side to wearing an N95 mask: It will not fog up your glasses. This was an unforeseen perk that I was quite happy with as I clasped the metal around my nose.
Mary and her husband, Casey, have been asymptomatic for a few days and while their doctors believed her to no longer be contagious, I was going to do everything I could to be safe. Which, unfortunately, included being quite a bit more removed than I would normally be.
I walked up to the garage, feeling the cold seep so easily through my layers and saturate my skin. The sun had set hours ago, leaving a cloudy, starless sky in its wake.
Mary and Casey were sitting in her partitioned garage; a cable leading from the house, through the garage door and into Mary’s lifting haven. This was necessary to allow the wifi to reach her computer and phone to connect to the Zoom for the competition and to the FaceTime for Wil Fleming, her coach, to prepare her.
I walk in, smiling; remembering that they can’t tell I’m smiling with the mask. I frown, probably making some stupid expression that was a mix of awkward embarrassment and not knowing what do with my face or my limbs. “Hi!”
“Hey!” Mary says, warmly. “Casey, this is Will,” she motions from Casey to me.
“You’re the photographer right?” Casey nods towards me, as I think we all try to pretend that there is not such a distance between us.
“That’s me,” I say, thankful for Mary’s generosity and Casey’s smile. After a moment of introductions - we had never met before, truly, I get to work setting up my tripod outside so it can gaze through the garage window. Casey left a small step ladder for me to use, which I propped one leg of the tripod precariously on.
I make my way back to the garage and Mary begins to touch the barbell. She explains all of the modifications she had to make to her garage to make it competition-ready. She had a tarp draped along the back wall to hide her many banners. She taped out an as-close-to-eight-feet-as-possible square around her small platform. She did this in case she stepped off the platform; the lift would count if the bar and her stayed within this tape square. Luckily, she took the precaution, as it would come into play for her first and only successful snatch of the competition.
Wil and a few of her teammates are yelling into the phone and Mary does as she is told as Casey loads the bar. It is his first experience with loading and with kilos; Mary was loaned a set from Charlie Spry, the president of the Wisconsin LWC.
After Mary’s snatches, we all take a breath. She had not been able to train properly due to having contracted Covid-19 the week before. In reality, the only day she was able to train during the taper was Friday.
Snatches were rough, but she is clutch in the clean and jerk, which would prove to be necessary.
You know what happens next. Casey makes easy work(ish) of loading the bar, with only a couple of hiccups that were immediately corrected before Mary took an attempt. Then, after Sarah Robles took her third and final clean and jerk attempt (missing the jerk), Mary stands.
She makes 158 kilos. This is the third heaviest clean and jerk performed by a woman in the history of USAW.
The only audible applause comes from Wil. “What?!” he screams into the mic, “that was amazing!”
Casey takes her into his arms and they both smile widely. Mary would walk away with a PR total after contracting and enduring Covid-19 the week before.
. . .
It’s nearly midnight when Mary let’s out her two puppies that are all too eager to get some attention. We laugh and tell stories under the moon and light of Christmas decorations.
This - this was the reason we couldn’t be together, all of us, in a central location. Because of risks of contracting the virus. And yet, against so many odds and so many obstacles, so many people were able to pull this competition together.
Not the same as it once was; perhaps it never will return to exactly what we were used to. But a national USAW meet - it felt like one giant step closer to what we all want.
To be together again.