I’m telling you this because this article you’re about to read is going to be a slight departure from my normal method. This isn’t going to be highly structured. It’s going to be a random collection of thoughts and ideas. It might not flow smoothly. It might jump around a bit. If you’re normally a structure person like me, this might be a tad frustrating for you. But I think it’s appropriate at the moment, since we’re currently living in a time of complete disorder and bedlam. We’re in the middle of Covid-19, social upheaval, racial justice protests, and economic collapse. You know…chaos. We’re getting a forced PhD in handling curveballs and obstacles. Our structured lifestyles have been flipped upside down, so this article is going to reflect the disorder that’s all around us. Read on at your own risk.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about when weightlifting comes to an end. I think it’s partially been on my mind because of the Covid-19 situation. In a way, weightlifting has come to a temporary end for all of us. I don’t mean our careers have been terminated or anything. We’re still in the game, and we’re surviving. But the normal experience we have as Olympic lifters, training and competing and enjoying the sport without having to worry about a scary disease that affects every aspect of our lives and especially our sport lives...that’s all been derailed for now. We’re floating in space, waiting to see what the future holds.

Right off the bat, I want to make it clear that this article isn’t a downer. Don’t think for one second that I’m talking about your weightlifting life like it’s all over, or that you’ve reached the end of your journey. That’s not what I’m saying, and I don’t believe that’s the case. Covid-19 is a temporary interruption. That’s what I believe. We’ll get our lives back. The sport and the people in it are too strong to fade away. Hold on to that idea.

Part of this “when it comes to an end” stuff that’s been on my mind is coming from conversations I’ve had with older athletes who experienced a big-time career back when they were younger, and then had to go through the time period of seeing it go away. Everybody who’s been an athlete for a sustained length of time gets to have a stretch that they can call their prime. Your prime is a window of time when you’re doing the biggest stuff of your career. It has a finite limit, obviously. We know this.

Weightlifting has a masters division, so it’s entirely possible to keep training and competing for many years even after your prime is over, as long as your body cooperates. But those years when you’re lifting the biggest weights of your life are fleeting. If you’re lucky, the biggest weights of your life put you at a high level where you’re achieving some noteworthy results. For many of you, the biggest weights of your life produced a state championship, or maybe an American Open qualifying total. For Pyrros Dimas, the biggest weights of his life produced three Olympic gold medals.

People pay a lot of attention to you when you’re a successful weightlifter. You get a lot of compliments, praise, celebration...that kind of stuff. And when your run at the top ends and you’re no longer the big star, you think people are still going to hold you in some importance. All the attention and adoration you got when you were on top felt a little like love, so even though you might not think it consciously, you expect some of that to still be there when you’re done. You think the fans are still going to put you on a pedestal.

It doesn’t work like that. People move on to the next big thing almost instantly. That’s just the nature of the game. When you‘re red hot, they treat you like a god. And then they forget about you pretty damn quick when your time finishes up.

I was never a world champion, but I was high enough on the national scene to experience a bit of this. It’s a bummer. Going from “big name” to “no name” hits your pride hard.

This is something every weightlifter who’s achieved some notoriety has to go through at some point. If you retire, it’s a little easier to swallow because you’re going out by your own choice. But when it happens because you start to slide down the rankings or, even worse, if you start getting your ass kicked by a new up-and-comer everybody’s in love with, it can get downright vicious. Because when these things happen, people don’t just stop paying attention to you. Many times, they’ll kick you when you’re down and disrespect you. All of this has gotten 1,000 times worse since social media blew up, because now every loser in the world gets to run their mouth at you from a keyboard with no consequences. They try to make you feel like you’re a piece of crap, because they’re pieces of crap and they want company.

This might not seem like something many of you can relate to, because most people never reach star level in the sport. But the subject has been on my mind a lot lately because, if you really think about it, we’ve all had to deal with loss over the last five months since COVID put our whole sport on ice. I know there’s not a direct connection between these two scenarios, but in both cases, there’s a common idea: you have to find ways to mentally handle the difficulty.

There are different kinds of mental toughness that are called for in these situations. If you retire and you have a hard time dealing with the loss of fan attention, you have to find the strength to start something new. You have to use courage and imagination to move on from the sport that was the foundation of your personality for so long and search for something else to give your life meaning. Many former lifters go straight into coaching when their athletic careers are over.

That’s one way to do it. Other people find another sport and start a new passion. I knew an elite weightlifter once who went into taekwondo after he retired, and he basically had an entire second sport career in it. That’s another option. And for many others, it’s the simple life of getting a job, starting a family, and living like a normal person. After many years of brutal competition, that might be the most satisfying and fulfilling thing in the world.

Those are life options after you retire. But what about the other kind of situation we mentioned, where you’re in your prime, but you slip from the top spot and start to slide down the rankings, accompanied by the jeers and criticism of the losers who want to drag you down. How can you survive that?

It’s actually pretty simple. You need the strength to ignore all of it. As they say on the Internet, you have to force yourself to not read the comments. And if you do read a bunch of negative crap people say about you, you can’t ever, ever, ever let yourself believe any of it. Hell, use it as fuel. Let your hate for those idiots strengthen your desire for success.

These are some scattered musings about how to fight back against different forms of setback and loss. And then there’s COVID…

In this situation, you simply have to find the inner strength to outlast the whole thing. It’s an endurance challenge. You all remember Muhammad Ali, obviously. He’s one of the greatest athletes of all time. But did you know Ali was kicked out of boxing for three years when he was in his fighting prime because he refused to go to Vietnam? True story. He got drafted, but he declared himself a conscientious objector because of his religious beliefs. The government dropped the hammer on him, the boxing commission suspended his license, and he was stripped of his title. He was 25 at the time, and in the best shape of his life.

Three years is a long time for any athlete, but especially for a fighter. It’s one thing to spend three years out of weightlifting and then come back to doing snatches and clean and jerks again. It’s a whole other ballpark to spend three years out of boxing and then get back in the ring with the toughest fighters in the world who want to beat the hell out of you. Talk about a different level of risk.

We all know the story. Ali eventually returned and became world champion again. Want to know how he did it? He spent every day of those three years believing deep down inside that he was eventually going to be the champ again. He made it back to the top for one simple reason: he willed himself to it. His level of self-confidence and determination was beyond imagination.

And that’s where you come in. We all have to will ourselves through this Covid thing right now. Hopefully it won’t last three years, but we’ve got no guarantees. The only thing that’s certain is the promise that the people who will be standing on top at the end of this will be the ones who won the battle inside, the battle against frustration and doubt.

What would you do right now if somebody said you were going to have to wait three years to compete again like Ali did? Could you last that long? Or would you crumble?

Seriously, think about it. The answer to that question is going to determine how the rest of your weightlifting life goes...so think hard.

These are just some thoughts about responding to challenges and unexpected obstacles. My apologies if it didn’t have the formal structure of an academic essay or article. It just seems like these days are a constant stream of conversations about handling hard times, you know? I’ve seen a lot of turmoil in the past, just like all of you. 9/11, the OJ Simpson trial, Hurricane Katrina, the LA riots, etc. These moments grabbed our attention and forced us to think about darkness. But there’s never been anything like COVID, at least not in my lifetime. This is a new level of tribulation. Add in all the other different forms of madness in our society right now, and it’s enough to wear down that optimistic nature you try to maintain.

I don’t have a magic solution, and I don’t believe there is one. We all have to be Muhammad Ali for now. We have to accept the stoppage of our goals, settle up with the uncertainty of when it’s going to end, and harden ourselves up inside to get through it.

We can do it. It’s been done before. The human spirit has triumphed over many things. But it took strong people to do it. Be one of those people. Let’s all do it together.