Wilbur Miller November 12, 1932 – August 5, 2020

By Thom Van Vleck

Wilbur was all around strong but he was perhaps most famous for his tremendous Deadlift made all the more impressive with the double overhand grip.

Wilbur was all around strong but he was perhaps most famous for his tremendous Deadlift made all the more impressive with the double overhand grip.

I bring sad news today.  The great Wilbur Miller has went to join the other strength greats in the big gym in the sky.  To say that Wilbur was a great strength athlete would be an understatement.  Here are some of his lifts.  Remember, these were in the 60s and Wilbur was a drug free athlete!

Wilbur’s best lifts in competition were: 725# deadlift, 320# clean and press, 320# snatch (split-style), and a 385# clean and jerk.  Wilbur often competed in the 240-250 lb bodyweight range.  He often gave up over 100 pounds bodyweight to his competitors!  His 725 pound deadlift was an World Record at the time, and was done in 1965 in York, Pennsylvania.  He weighed 245 pounds in that meet.  Even more impressive was that Wilbur had a competitive lifting career that spanned over 50 years!  At age 79 he deadlifted 457lbs!

My connection to Wilbur dates back to the 1960s.  He and my uncle, Wayne Jackson, had a long standing rivalry on the lifting platform.  But off the platform they were the best of friends.  When I started lifting as a teen I trained with my Uncle Wayne and he often would tell stories about Wilbur.

Wayne had great respect for Wilbur.  Back then in the Olympic lifts they did the Clean & Press before the Snatch and Clean & Jerk.  My Uncle Wayne always beat Wilbur on the Clean & Press.  But Wilbur, being a very competitive man, would come back and beat Wayne in the Snatch and Clean & Jerk and win the overall.  As a kid it elevated my Uncle to hero status in my book that he could best the great Wilbur Miller at anything.  It was like throwing a strike against Babe Ruth.

In 1984 I was lifting in a meet in Wichita.  My Uncle Wayne came along and we contacted Wilbur.  Wilbur came by and hung out all day.  He and my Uncle Wayne laughed, told stories, and Wilbur was very polite, open, honest and had little of the ego many lifters of his status have.

The next time I saw Wilbur was about about 20 years later when I did an article on him for Milo.  He was still in Medicine Lodge, Kansas with his wife.  I stopped by for a visit.  You’d think we had been friends our whole lives.  He was still training in his garage on a set of York weights from the 60’s.  He took me to his “trophy room” and told me stories about each of the mementos, photos, and awards.  The whole time he had a smile on his face.

His obituary is as follows:

Wilbur D. Miller, of Wellington, Kansas, passed away on Wednesday, August 5, 2020 at the Glen Carr House in Derby, Kansas at the age of 87.
He was born the son of Howard and Flossie (Brewer) Miller on Saturday, November 12, 1932 in Gray County, Kansas. Wilbur’s grandparents homesteaded the family land and he continued farming the land for many years. On February 5, 1966, Wilbur and Janet (Falkingham) were united in marriage at the First Presbyterian Church in Fredonia, Kansas. Together they celebrated over 54 years of marriage. He was an outdoors-man that enjoyed hunting, fishing and backpacking. Wilbur took up weightlifting as a young man and continued lifting well into his 80’s. He held several national competitive weightlifting records and was a member of the National Weightlifting Hall of Fame. Wilbur loved books and was an avid reader of Louis L’Amour. Additionally, he was a talented musician who taught himself to play the ukulele and harmonica simultaneously and loved to play with his dad and brother. His family remembers him as a great father and grandfather whose calm, steady nature served as the rock of the family. He will be missed by all that knew him.
Survivors include his wife, Janet Miller of Wellington, Kansas; son, William Parker of Tekoa, Washington; son, Robert Parker and his wife Karen of Raymondville, Missouri; daughter, Nancy Fischer and her husband Andy of Golden, Colorado; daughter, Julie Carey and her husband Jeff McGuire of Wellington, Kansas; son, Christoper Miller and his wife Ann of Inman, Kansas, grandchildren: TJ Mensch, Staci Miller Ulrich, Jason Parker, Alexander Parker, Angela Collins, Amanda Ray, Stephen Hoyt, Tricia Halling, Matthew Hoyt, Parker Hoyt, Jeffrey McGuire, Rachel McGuire, Lily McGuire, Kristin Miller, Andy Miller and Anabelle Miller along with numerous great-grandchildren.
He was preceded in death by his parents, Howard and Flossie Miller; brother, Duane Miller and a great-granddaughter, Kennedy Hoyt.

There are many great stories about Wilbur.  All show a man with great strength and greater character.  I am hoping those who knew him will share one on the message board and we can send them to his family.  Additionally, I wrote an article on Wilbur in Milo Strength Journal and if you want a copy let me know.  Al Myers wrote a great article on Wilbur that you can find on this website by using the search box.

So take a minute to remember Wilbur Miller.  And let’s try to be more like him as well.  Strong of body, strong of character.

Aging and Strong (Part II)

AGING AND STRONG

Part II: The Effects of Aging 

By Dan Wagman, Ph.D., C.S.C.S.

Ever since I got involved in all-round weightlifting I developed an interest in the aging and strength issue. This because of the age adjustment formula used and how arbitrary and capricious it appears to be. Still, just about anybody will tell you that as you age your performance declines. If this is true, to what extent might your strength decline? There are literally thousands of scientific studies on the topic of aging. As strength athletes our focus is on muscle. And with all those studies the human brain isn’t capable of determining the proverbial bottom line. For that reason, statisticians have developed a technique called meta-analysis. This method of data analysis allows researchers to input all sorts of information from an unlimited number of studies and on the other end come up with that elusive bottom line, such as whether your inescapable increases in age will make you weaker.

The Basics

The place to start is to develop an overall understanding of whether healthy non-athlete people lose strength as they age, then to ask what effects lifting weights might have. Some of the findings for non-athletes were presented in Part I.  But if you looked at all of the relevant research on muscle strength and activation between young and older people, then perhaps you could find out what the bottom line is. A group of researchers from Marquette University and the University of South Australia collaborated to find out.(4)

So how do you test an old muscle compared to a young one? The two most reliable ways are called the interpolated twitch technique (ITT) and the central activation ratio (CAR). Don’t worry, I won’t bore you to death with the details of these methods, but I do believe that you’ll find the basics of at least ITT interesting. What researchers do is have a subject, say a 25-year old, perform a maximal isometric contraction against an immovable object and take a reading on that muscle. Then, during that maximal contraction they deliver an electrical stimulation to that muscle’s main nerve. If additional force or activation is generated, that means during the subject’s own maximal contraction the muscle received inadequate neural input and thus contracted submaximally, and of course you can measure the difference. Then you repeat with a 60-year old and see to what extent, if any, the older person’s muscle contracts with less neural input. If that happens, then you know that aging could impact muscle activation.

There are, of course, other considerations to bear in mind, which is why the researchers set specific standards all of the studies had to meet to be included in their meta-analysis. Besides using only ITT or CAR studies had to look at young people between 18 and 35-years and those 60 and older, the study had to be published in English, only studies with the lowest bias risk were considered, etc.

A General View

As a whole, age made no difference in muscle activation capability in a healthy non-athlete population of men and women. As an example, 18 studies looked at the biceps with the age in the young people ranging between 19.9 to 30.6 and the older people between 69 and 84 years; 12 of the studies found no difference. Similarly, for the knee extension muscles 9 out of 17 studies found no difference; for the flexor group of the foot 9 out of 12 studies found no difference, etc.

The researchers found that across all muscles investigated (elbow flexors, wrist flexors, knee extensors, plantar flexors, and ankle dorsiflexors), with a total of 790 young subjects and 828 older ones, in 70% of them no significant age-related differences in muscle activation were observed and in 28% younger muscles were able to activate to a greater degree than older ones. In a general sense then, age would not seem to make a difference in a muscle’s ability to contract. But this represents a general analysis, not the actual meta-analysis.

Enter Meta-Analysis

Once the scientists applied the meta-analysis technique to sort through all the data points, a bit of a different picture emerged. What they learned was that voluntary muscle activation was greater in younger people than older ones. However, the difference was very small and the research team explained that this finding could be due to the muscle group that was looked at in different studies, how muscle activation was calculated in each study, the way in which the muscle was stimulated, and number of stimulations used.

In analyzing the number of muscle stimulations a study employed, if it was once there were no significant differences in the strength of muscle activation between young and old. If, however, the number of muscle stimulations were more than one, then the young people reached the level of significantly greater muscle activation over older ones. In looking at the different muscle groups, the scientists learned that younger subjects outperformed older ones in the plantar flexors, knee extensors, and elbow flexors but not in the wrist flexors and ankle dorsiflexors.

Interpretation

What this study of the studies found is that older, healthy, non-athletic people have, in the words of the researchers, “a reduced ability to maximally activate their muscle during isometric contractions.” One of the problems with this finding was, however, the large range of older subjects’ age from 60 to 84. As the researchers point out, “it is well known that the deficits in muscle function are accelerated in very old age (~80 yrs.).” This means that if you have a bunch of 80+ year olds along with people in their 60’s, the results might end up being skewed toward the muscle abilities of the 80+ year olds. Put another way, if you eliminated the 80+ year olds from analysis, then perhaps no differences between young and old muscle activation abilities would be found.

With that in mind I closely scrutinized all of the studies that found a deficit in older people’s muscle activation in an effort to ascertain at what age this might start to appear. The youngest age of the old group that displayed this deficit was 67 years. The vast majority of subjects were, however, in their 70’s and beyond.

Perhaps the most important consideration for the finding that younger muscle can activate to a greater extent than an older one is whether this difference is actually of any practical meaning. To put it in to a lifter’s terms, if you find that with 60 you end up lifting 100 pounds less than when you were 30, you might consider that meaningful. If, however, you find that with 60 you end up lifting 30 pounds less you probably wouldn’t consider that meaningful nor give it a second thought. After all, there are an infinite number of reasons for a young lifter to end up lifting 30 pounds less, too.

The researchers addressed this, though unfortunately not in a lifter’s terms. What they stated is that the loss in isometric muscle contraction force due to age was only “modest.” They therefore questioned the degree of meaningfulness of the overall findings. You also have to consider that the older subjects displayed a high degree of variability in muscle activation. In addition, multiple studies have found that when older subjects are able to practice the type of muscle contraction, they attain similar levels of muscle contraction as healthy young adults.(1-3,5).

So What?

That final consideration takes us in to the realm of people who lift weights. For those who don’t, the effects of aging are only moderate and don’t seem to make a noticeable difference until the late 60’s or so. This is most certainly a surprising finding, especially if you consider the issue of whole body disuse. If you’re a 30-year old healthy but sedentary person, then your years of body disuse has been about 15 years if you consider that even a non-athletic child and young teenager might get a little bit of exercise due to play. But that same sort of person who’s 60 has been sedentary for 45 years. If in that sort of person the effect of aging on muscle is only moderate, what might it be for someone who’s pumping iron religiously?

There are likely readers among you who will take this information as being exceptionally motivating, allowing them to make all this “getting older” talk disappear in a cloud of chalk as they prepare to crank out another set. But there will also be readers who’ll want to instead dismiss what they learned because it flies in the face of what they think they know. After all, everybody knows that as you get older, man or woman, your hormone levels decrease and that’s why you can’t be as strong as what you used to be. Part III will investigate.

 

References

  1. Hunter, S., et al. Recovery from supraspinal fatigue is slowed in old adults after fatiguing maximal isometric contractions. Journal of Applied Physiology 105(4): 1199–209, 2008.
  2. Hunter, S., et al. The aging neuromuscular system and motor performance. Journal of Applied Physiology 121(4):982–95, 2016.
  3. Jakobi, J. and Rice C. Voluntary muscle activation varies with age and muscle group. Journal of Applied Physiology 93(2):457–62, 2002.
  4. Rozand, V., et al. Age-related deficits in voluntary activation: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 52(3):549-560, 2020.
  5. Rozand, V., et al. Voluntary activation and variability during maximal dynamic contractions with aging. European Journal of Applied Physiology 117(12):2493–507, 2017.

 

The Life of John Carter

By Bill Clark

Twenty five years ago, Harrisburg’s John Carter was on the top of the weightlifting world, then he disappeared only to resurface in recent months at Clark’s Gym – still the guy to beat when it comes to the world of chain lifting.

A quarter of a century ago, John, now 61 and looking as trim and fit as he did in 1988 when he first showed up in Clark’s Gym, compiled such world class marks as 3,405 pounds in the harness lift; 2,805 in the back lift; 2,525 in the hip lift: and 2,000 in the Carter Lift, named for him because few others in the lifting world even attempted it.

In his first meet back in 20 years, just before the corona virus pandemic hit, he took the title in the meet named for his main adversary of three decades ago – the Steve Schmidt Backbreaker Pentathlon. Steve was on hand to officiate.

John Carter about to complete his 3,405 pound harness lift. Note the position of his left hand .

John Carter about to complete his 3,405 pound harness lift. Note the position of his left hand .

And just who is this John Carter?

Let’s say he’s a survivor.

John was born November 28, 1958, the son of John Jerome Carter, Sr., and Delores Carter. He attended school at Harrisburg from the first through the ninth grades, but left school at age 16 never to return.

His dad was a heavy equipment operator and John wanted to follow in his dad’s footsteps. By the time he was eight years old, he was operating his dad’s bulldozer and soon thereafter was driving a car around the area.

At age 12, he took the family car to town, ran out of gas at the courthouse and approached life from a different angle for years to come.

In his junior high years, John showed his athletic ability and his strength by setting the school records in the shot and discus and playing basketball, but he also was plagued by discipline matters.

In the seventh grade, he took issue with a classmate in a gym class and went to fists, as he was wont to do on too many occasions then and later. In the fight that followed, John’s punch missed the opponent’s head and he hit the wall behind, breaking his arm in six places and shattering his wrist.

John had a powerful punch, but not well-directed.

The injury almost cost him his athletic future. He had to have plates inserted in the wrist that left it fixed in place without flexibility – and a four-month stay at Boone Hospital. Fortunately, it was his left hand. The plates are still there.

Even to this day, the injury hampers his mechanics as a lifter and golfer that requires modification of leverages and style, but not with final results.

When John reported to Harrisburg High to start his sophomore year, he was told his hair was too long and after a battle with administration, he left school three years short of graduation to get into the construction world at age 16. The bulldozers quickly followed.

John then began a journey through life that was filled with twists and turns. He spent two years at MFA Feed and Supply, worked concrete for NuWay Construction, was in a concrete footing business with two partners for three years, moved on to work on the development of Cedar Lake for Terry Sapp, supplemented his income by cutting tobacco for Henry Lamb, the “Tobacco King,” married, had a son, Jason (who is his best friend), divorced, then moved on to work for Columbia Public Works, retiring, after 23 years, in 2002.

He spent much of his career on the seat he loved the most – handling a bulldozer and heavy equipment. He still enjoys that role. He has owned Carter Construction since retiring from the city – which coincided with John’s fade from the world lifting scene.

John about to shoulder a 375-pound personal record Steinborn lift. Note the left hand position.

John about to shoulder a 375-pound personal record Steinborn lift. Note the left hand position.

THE CARTER SPORTS WORLD

One of the personal losses that came with being a high school dropout was leaving behind his love of competitive athletics.

He soon joined a Looper League softball team, then spent the next 20 years as a slow pitch softball player.

“My career ended when I blew up at an umpire’s call and he threw me out of the game and said: ‘Don’t ever come back out here.’ The umpire was one of my friends at work, Bill Crum. I never went back.”

In 1982, he discovered bowling and was a regular on the lanes in Columbia for 20 years – good enough to carry a 190-plus average and add an 800 patch to his awards showcase. His high game was 297.

Golf came next – in 1986. The game proved to be a real challenge. The shattered left wrist caused John to develop a different stroke, but he can still drive past the 300-yard mark. Golf has been a part of life for almost four decades.

In 1988, for a reason John cannot recall, he decided to take up weightlifting. Clark’s Gym had just opened and, after visiting other gyms in Columbia, he gave Clark’s a look – and immediately joined.

“I made the right choice,” he said recently. “The gym saved my life.

“When I was going through my divorce, the gym became the place I could vent my anger. More than once, I almost let my anger misdirect me, but I would detour to the gym.”

John was an immediate world class lifter. To meet him on the street or even in workout gear, he looks normal. He’s 5-11, weighs around 215, has surprisingly slender legs and trim middle.

Within a year, he had emerged as a world class lifter, winning both the national and world all-round titles in 1989 in Philadelphia.

In a four-year stretch between 1994 and 1997, he won the national title and added golds in two of the toughest strength tests around – the Backbreaker Pentathlon and the Zercher Memorial.

In 1995, he performed the difficult combination hip lift and squat with 2,000 pounds – a lift that carries his name. No one else has done half that poundage.

He is proud of  his gym record of doing a single workout (two hours long) of 1,821 reps in the hip lift with 1,100 pounds – a total workout of 2,002,100 pounds.

In 1992, he met Diane Stone and she led the family cheering section in 1994 when John won a Gold Cup in Cleveland, Ohio, by setting a world record in the harness lift. She is still his head cheerleader.

Then, in 2004, it all ended. The business was a one-man operation and time-consuming. As it grew, so did the distance between John Carter and Clark’s Gym.

On rare occasion, he would drop in, tell stories with the owner about days gone by, see if he could still do a 1,500-pound hip lift, then disappear for a few more years.

Late in 2019, he found that, at age 60, he had trouble with 1,000 in the hip lift – and the reality of aging shocked him into action.

For 60 years, he had been headstrong, defiant, living life head-on, willing to fight. He lifted weights with the same mindset. Strength meant more than  technique, and failure was not tolerated as a chance to do things different.

Diane and being a business owner had both helped him get control. Golf, too, had been a stabilizer. He could still hit the ball hard, but he had to master the other shots as well.

Now, back n the gym full-time since 2004, John is the teacher as well as the student. He has accepted the fact that, at 61, he is no longer 31, and that a harness lift of 3,405 will never happen again and that 2,405 is a more reasonable goal – and still a world record for 61-year-olds.

Last month, in an unsanctioned competition to do 61 different lifts at age 61, John exceeded the existing national records in over 50 events for the 100-kilo class in the 60-64 age group.

Welcome home, John!!

Aging and Strong (Part I)

AGING AND STRONG

Part I:  On Fairness and Common Sense

By Dan Wagman, Ph.D., C.S.C.S.

All-round weightlifting uses an age adjustment formula in an effort to essentially equate the strength performance of competitors regardless of chronological age. Upon applying this formula, competitors are ranked to determine overall competition placings regardless of age or division entered (a body weight formula is used, too). For adults, once you turn 40 you receive an additional 1% per year up until you’re 60, at which point you receive 2% for each additional year of life. A few years back one lifter stated on the USAWA forum, loosely quoted, “I won’t win anything until I’m over 40.” Another lifter told me recently how “embarrassing” it is to be out-totaled, yet be considered the winner due to being older.

Now, you might wonder how much of a difference age adjustments can actually make. You’d have to take the body weight adjustment out of the equation by looking at two lifters in the same weight class, one being less than 40, the other over 40. In doing so, at the 2019 All-Round Weightlifting World Championships one lifter was out-totaled by over 300 pounds, yet placed higher. As this example illustrates, in all-round weightlifting—a strength sport—a lifter’s strength can be less meaningful than his/her age.

 

Contemplation

There are several ways to evaluate the age adjustment. With the above example in mind, perhaps the most basic is to ask whether it makes sense and is fair. However, these two very basic questions will invariably lead in to the realm of science. Allow me to illustrate.

On the question of being sensible, let’s approach it this way; take a lifter who’s born May 1st and is 39 years old. She receives no age adjustments. However, next year, when she turns 40 she’ll receive +1% in any meet that takes place on May 1st or thereafter. So what happened to her on May 1st of the next year that makes her 1% weaker than what she was on April 30th? Most anybody you’d ask would likely tell you this is silly because aging effects are gradual and occur over many years, decades even. Clearly this approach lacks common sense. So what are the effects of aging on a human’s muscles? You can only answer that via scientific investigation.

Regarding fairness, take that same lifter who’s born May 1st and competing on that very day against a lifter who’s born May 7th of the same year. The former lifter will receive a 1% adjustment while the latter won’t. How could that be considered fair? One week older makes a 1% difference in performance? What if the second lifter was born on June 2nd, or December 14th? Would that increased difference in age now all of a sudden make a more noticeable difference in strength performance? And if the difference is actually 12 months or more, is the difference really 1% for every year? In an effort to be fair to all competitors, wouldn’t we need to know for certain that the aging effect starts with 40 and not 38 or 44 or 63? If we don’t know that, how can this be fair? Science can help us figure it out.

 

Why Science?

At this point it might be worthwhile to explain why I always turn to science in an effort to derive at answers regarding weight training. The most fundamental reason is that if your training isn’t based on science you’re wasting your time on one end of the spectrum and on the other, increasing injury risk exponentially leading to decreased performance and a shortened lifting career.

Aaron Coutts, PhD, distinguished professor in sport and exercise science from the University of Technology in Sidney, Australia, and the Associate Editor for the International Journal of Sport Physiology and Performance offers more detail.(2) In writing about the importance of turning to sports science he listed the following reasons: improved training and performance, reduced training errors such as injuries and inappropriate training approaches, being able to balance benefits and risks in decision making, and being able to challenge belief-based views with evidence.

These are certainly compelling reasons for turning to science. But all-round weightlifting already relies on science, so why not regarding chronological age, too? Our sport employs science-based doping control methods and certified labs to analyze urine samples. This, to ascertain if lifters are using drugs to enhance their performance and thus achieving an unfair advantage. So why not also use science when making a determination about how chronological age may impact strength performance and competition placing? Isn’t the singular concept of fairness reason enough?

 

A First Step in to Science

What evidence is there that due to aging a 40-year old is weaker than a 39-year old, or a 33-year old, or a 27-year old? What evidence is there that a 60-year old is 2% weaker than a 57-year old? Why not use 0.8% and 2.36%, or 3% and 4%? If you’re thinking that I’m being silly and perhaps even nitpicking, consider that precision is the name of the game in strength sport. If you did a 315-pound one-armed deadlift in the 198-pound class and so did another lifter in the same weight class, you’d win if you weighed in at 195.5 compared to the other guy’s 196. If that half-pound difference bears consideration, wouldn’t logic dictate that we would have to know with as much certainty as possible what the aging effects upon strength are?

Here’s what we know about healthy but otherwise sedentary people:(1, 3-6)

  • A woman’s loss of muscle mass is greater than a man’s, particularly once she passes 60;
  • Decreases in strength are only slight by 50;
  • At 60 decreases in strength are more pronounced in both genders;
  • For women muscle contraction speed starts to decrease by 40, speed of muscle relaxation by 50;
  • Magnitude of strength loss is inconsistent among men and women;
  • Degree of strength loss is different between muscle groups and individual muscles;
  • Women show a slower decline in biceps and triceps strength than men;
  • Factors associated with strength loss impact upper body muscles differently than lower body muscles;
  • Strength loss appears to be most dramatic at about 80 for both genders;
  • Strength declines can fairly suddenly reach 30% beginning at about 80;
  • Strength losses are not linear and plateaus are observed;
  • 87 to 96-year old men and women showed a high capacity for strength and muscle gain following a science-based high-intensity resistance training protocol.

So this is what’s generally seen in a healthy but non-athletic population. What should jump out at you is the high degree of variability in strength loss and the higher age at which it occurs to a meaningful extent. Also, this is information I picked out and can be potentially misleading due to personal bias, the different research methodologies used in the studies, etc. Therefore, in Part II I’ll present research to show what the proverbial bottom line is. Then we’ll move on to people like you—the ageless barbell benders.

 

References

  1. Carmeli, E., et al. The biochemistry of aging muscle. Experimental Gerontology 37:477-489, 2002.
  2. Coutts, A. Challenges in developing evidence-based practice in high-performance sport. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance 12:717, 2017.
  3. Danneskoild-Samsoe, B., et al. Muscle strength and functional capacity in 77-81 year old men and women. European Journal of Applied Physiology 52:123-135, 1984.
  4. Hughes, V., et al. Longitudinal muscle strength changes in older adults: Influence of muscle mass, physical activity, and health. Journal of Gerontology: Biological Sciences, Medical Sciences 56:B209-B217, 2001.
  5. Landers, K., et al. The interrelationship among muscle mass, strength, and the ability to perform physical tasks of daily living in younger and older women. Journal of Gerontology: Biological Sciences, Medical Sciences 56:B443-B448, 2001.
  6. Paasuke, M., et al. Age-related differences in twitch contractile properties of plantarflexor muscles in women. Acta Physiologica Scandinavica 170:51-57, 2000.

Learning A New Skill

By Christopher Lestan

I thought I might make a post recently because I haven’t been active in a while.

During this time of social distancing I been learning about myself a lot since there is plenty of time to just think now. One of the important things I learned from my father is to keep headstrong and focused during times like these. In other words he says “Keep busy”. Now after school ended early for me around March I was lost in limbo for a few weeks. No more jobs are available. No ability to train with friends. Not being able to have a couple of beers with the boys at our favorite local bar where the beers are 2$ a pour!

This was a strange time indeed. Fortunately, my family is always there to help. My dad who recently became an electrician and worked for the city of Boston was off of work until mid-May. He realized that I was very lost in what to do. In a conversation he and I reached an agreement of him teaching me how to landscape and plant trees since he worked at our family’s nursery when he was young. He also added that he would help me redo our Aunt’s Yard, for she recently moved into a new house and the yard needed some fixing.

For the past month and a half I can confidently say my Aunt’s yard has new grass seed, mulch, trimmed bushes, and new plants. I also planted a couple Hemlock trees in our back yard. I was soon fixing both grandparents’ houses and even took a tree stump out of the ground and put in a new willow tree for one of them. Soon I was in charge of taking care of 3 lawns.

Now you may be asking what was the point of me telling this story… Well, I think it’s important for people to learn new things especially when times are strange and even in their free time. I never thought I would be redoing whole lawns and even spreading mulch and soil to make lawns look nicer, or even plant trees. It’s a rewarding experience.

When you do something rewarding you build confidence that can be utilized for other things. SUCH AS LIFTING!!! My lifts are finally coming back to normal after my injury in December and have learned to gain confidence when there are no spotters. Now with the nice weather I can build an outdoor platform and compete in the 3rd Postal!!

I can’t wait for things to slowly come back to normal and to see my friend group.

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