Why I Love Weightlifting Part 1: The Bug Bit

For those who know me, it’s no secret that I love weightlifting. It’s been a full-blown obsession—bordering on diagnosable—ever since I competed in my first meet back in 2001. In this post, I want to give a brief history of my journey through the sport to try and explain why I love such a simple, yet powerful, sport.

Like many young men, I started training to get stronger for football. And by “started training,” I mean being dragged—kicking and screaming—by my dad across the street to our local World Gym.

You see, training had always been a part of my dad’s life. We had a full powerlifting gym in our basement when I was a kid, and I used to watch him lift. But I didn’t share his interest—not at first. Outside of playing on the equipment when he wasn’t home, I had zero motivation to train.

That changed a bit in seventh grade when I started playing football. My dad encouraged me as much as he could to come to the gym with him. I went a few times, but honestly, I didn’t enjoy it. (That would change in a big way later on.)

Fast forward a year. It’s the summer before eighth grade. My dad built a platform in our garage, pulled his old powerlifting bar out of the attic, set up squat racks, a bench, and some plates—and we started training again. This time, I was motivated.

We set a goal: back squat 135 lbs for five reps by the end of summer. I hit that goal. It was my first real lesson in goal setting. When the school year started, the weights got put away and the focus shifted to sports again.

Then something unexpected happened the following spring. The head football coach of my soon-to-be high school—who happened to live across the street—asked my dad to help out in the school weight room. My dad agreed, and that spring he started training me and some of my classmates. By summer, he was running the weight room for the whole football team. I kept training with the team for about a year.

Then came another spring—seems like big things always happened to me in the spring—and we went to train with Tim Swords in the basement of his mother’s house in New Martinsville, WV. It was there that Tim told my dad and me that I should start Olympic weightlifting.

For some reason, that idea stuck. We went home, started figuring out how to snatch and clean & jerk, and signed up for the 2001 AAU Junior Olympics in Virginia Beach. Yep—my first weightlifting meet required a 12-hour drive.

On that drive—and maybe still on a lonely VHS tape somewhere—I talked about being "on the Road to the Gold" and how I was going to win the Junior Olympics. I had no reason to be confident. I didn’t know how a competition worked, didn’t know what I could lift compared to others, and didn’t even understand what weights were on the bar since it was all in kilos and we had trained in pounds.

But somehow, I went 6-for-6 and won the meet.

That was it—the moment the bug bit. After that first meet, all I wanted to do was train weightlifting. I kept playing football but dropped all other sports so I could train more. I loved it. I loved the process.

Weightlifting was me vs. me. Unlike team sports, where a great individual performance could still end in a loss (and sometimes go unnoticed), weightlifting put everything on the individual. If I didn’t improve, I had no one to blame but myself. If I did well, all the credit was mine.

It was purely objective. And I was hooked.