“...It was like
A new knowledge of reality.”
—Wallace Stevens, “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself”
One of my favorite moments in the history of powerlifting is Doc Rhodes’ third deadlift at the 1977 IPF Worlds in Australia. Rhodes was in the 165-lb weight class and had squatted 512 lbs and benched 374 lbs. He needed to deadlift 655 lbs on his third attempt to win the gold over Great Britain’s Peter Fiore. Despite severe arm cramps before the attempt, Rhodes gutted out the 655 lbs. Legendary powerlifter Vince Anello was one of Rhodes’ teammates and has called it “one of the most hardcore efforts in powerlifting history.”
See 39 seconds at:
Every powerlifter knows that feeling, the transformative exhilaration of a maximal lift done on the platform. Reality becomes brighter, and one is never the same.
During this ritual of total effort compressed in seconds, our species displays some of its finest qualities—courage, intensity, and tenacity. I recently had the privilege to see these qualities in a friend who started competing this year.
On July 24, my friend, Cathy Cox, competed at the USAPL Raw Nationals in Charlottesville, Virginia. After setting a personal record on her first deadlift, Cathy went to 275 lbs on her second attempt. She attempted this weight about two weeks before the meet, and the bar didn’t move. The same thing happened on her second attempt.
This is where a lifter disintegrates or dominates. I loosened Cathy’s belt by a notch to enable a more extended back and told her to tighten her triceps before driving her legs.
As Cathy began her third attempt, the bar seemed glued to the floor once again. But then it moved and kept moving all the way to a glorious lockout.
This is how it should be—nothing left on the platform and all of one’s training realized in the only place that matters.
The poet James Dickey once observed, “Hard, intense work of the body…is the most conclusive evidence of our own being that we could possibly have.” Every time we train and compete, we justify our bodies and establish purpose in ourselves. We transcend the ordinary and prove we are passionately alive.