...Its a super awesome achievement to pull off a WR even in an age category.
..WR
especially in an age category.
This might start a bun fight but.....
It's not until you are hit by the gradual degeneration of your body that you begin to fully appreciate the sacrifices and determination of masters lifters.
You see some open class lifter or under 40yo bodybuilder doing some insane heavy or high set/high rep workout but there is a very good chance that in 5-10 years they will be out of the sport. Interview a few of those people when they hit 40+ and you get all sorts of nostalgia about "back when" but they don't have the humility and mental strength to keep going despite not being able to do perform to the same standard.
We get our panties wet watching John Haack/Brett Gibbs going toe to toe but don't bother watching a 60 year old woman pulling a world record and, with the Wilks age co-efficient, blowing them out of the water.
In many sports, such as boxing, MMA, olympic weightlifting, etc, we tend to just watch the super heavyweights going at it. The lighter weight classes don't seem to have as much glamour (despite often being better athletes) because we have a tendency to equate greatness with a number. Big is good. Bigger is better.
I notice that in the IPF they rarely promote masters lifters, often leaving them out all together when listing achievements from a competition. Recently I took them to task on this and they had the audacity to claim that they included masters lifters because Liz Craven was included (in the M1 category) but they did not mention that she was competing as an open lifter. There you go.
If you are under 40 and think training is hard, wait until you have to get up to pee 4 times a night, when your doms last a whole week (or more), when you find that nagging niggle in your shoulder is permanent, when gripping a bar brings on arthritic type pain in your fingers for 3 or 4 days, when you have to warm up just to go get the mail, when everything hurts all the time, all day, every day.
Then you go into the gym and get shit done and sign up for a comp where your lifts will be used as a test dummy to make sure that the lights and platform are working for the open class lifters coming later that day or week. When you are are about to do your last lift and the tech guys arrive to set up the live stream. When you read the write up of the entire comp and they only mention open (and maybe junior lifters). When your national team throws a veritable street parade for an open lifter who got bronze but the 70 year old guy or 65 year old woman who won gold is not even mentioned.
It's a shame that it's like that, but then that's the way its always been and always will be.
Here is a vid of Wim Van Weenan. His Wilks total that day, weight and age included in the calculation, was 619. Suck on that.
