I recently competed in the Mia Classic 2 of 2012, held on March 31. It was a developmental meet held on a local level, so national quality lifting was not the theme of the day, but it was a lot of fun, and the following video gives you a good example of what you can expect from your first weightlifting meet. 

It was my first official oly competition, and while I trained hard to perform my best, I failed to do what I came to do. I wanted to set PR's in both my snatch and clean & jerk, but as usual, had a few issues along the way. Firstly, one week prior to competition, I took the IKFF certification to become a Certified Kettlebell Teacher (CKT). One of the goals with kettlebell training is power endurance, maintaining high levels of output for a sustained period of time. This is slightly contradictory to classic weightlifting, where each lift takes a total of a few seconds, where you then get to take a rest before lifting again. I trained for both of the goals, power endurance and max power, simultaneously. Thus, neither of the ends were maximized. Thats the way it goes. 

During this time, I weighed in at 204 on Feb 29, just a month before competition day on March 31, in which I registered to compete at 85kg (187 lbs). That left me a month to lose 17 lbs. I actually dropped 20 lbs and weighed in with a few pounds to spare at 184.

Dropping that much weight in a month left me a little depleted of energy, and not only did I not set my PR goals, but I didn't even come close to what I was lifting in training just a few months prior to the competition. Competition nerves compounded with battling some shoulder and hip issues and I was pretty disappointed with my performance, but I had a great time at the meet, met some great people, got to lift and had a bunch of fun. I will do it again, I will learn from my experience and I will perform better next time. 

I came in 2nd in my class, and the guy who won my class won the Sinclair total (basically the best overall lifter). One of the funny things I realized is that if I stayed heavier, I would have came in first in the 94 kg class, as my numbers were the best in that division, but I wouldn't have had the struggle of losing all the weight, would have remained stronger and put more focus into performance instead of weight loss. Lesson learned. Especially at this level, just focus on performance. But if I didn't lose that weight, you wouldn't have asked the question, "How did you do it?" Well, I outline my basic nutrition and training plan on The Consummate Athlete if you're interested. Enough talking. Here is the video of the meet if you have an extra 15 minutes. You'll see the guys warm up and snatch. You'll see me power snatch because my shoulder was giving me issues in the bottom of the catch, so I just powered it to be safe. And I hate that because competition isn't always safe, you just gotta get it done sometimes, even if that goes against my beliefs. Then in the c&j, again you see me power clean easy weight for me and witness me get my ass kicked by the jerks. I totally sucked balls in the jerks, it ruined my day. For both the snatch and the c&j, I choose easy openers to take the pressure off and get on the board. It was fine with the snatch, and I could have snatched a lot more weight which is evident in the video, but that doesn't matter. But my "easy opener" for the c&j proved to be a different story. Easy clean yes, but the jerks went to crap, and it is my training's fault, I rarely practiced them and they are my weakest link. Take a gander...