By Andrew Wickham
This weekend marks the culmination of the amateur strongman year for most competitors. Whether you’ve been training for this for 2 months, 6 months, or a year for this event, your time is up. There’s no more time to train hard, to make up for that workout you missed last week, to try for that new rep PR you were hoping to get before nationals rolled around. No, in fact at this point anything you do to push your body further isn’t going to make you stronger on Friday and Saturday, you’ve done all you can. All the hard work is done and the dedication is about to pay off. (This excludes those folks who have to cut to make weight, I sincerely feel sorry for you guys and am thankful I don’t have to do it. I admire the commitment it takes and respect the hell out of everyone cutting weight for nationals. Very thankful I’m a heavyweight.)
This Friday and Saturday I will be stronger than I’ve ever been in my entire life. The same will be true for many others. That’s what makes a competition like this so great, you truly have the best amateur athletes in the sport going head to head at a competition they’ve known about well in advance. Some qualified for this 2 months ago, some 6 months, some over a year, but all of us have known the events and weights for the same amount of time. We’ve all trained in our own different ways, made varying levels of sacrifice in our personal lives, and punished our bodies with one goal in mind: to defeat the rest of our competition and emerge victorious in Las Vegas on Saturday November 11th.
We’ve all put in the time and the work, now that time is up, now we wait. For the next 3 days we will all prepare in our own ways for the events of the coming weekend. 2 days of rest, recovery, and mental preparation. 2 days of refueling, foam rolling, and stretching. Now is not the time to lick your wounds, to complain about what went wrong or what hurts, to make excuses. Now is the time to focus, visualize, and get ready. This weekend I’ll get to see many old friends and make many new ones, I can’t wait to share this experience with all of the 200+ strongmen and strongwomen that will be competing this weekend. I’m ready to show the Strongman world what I’m made of. Are you?
Andrew Wickham is a heavyweight strongman competitor based out of San Luis Obispo California. He is the founder of the SLO Strong Strongman and Event Promotion Team as well as the 2017 Heavyweight California’s Strongest Man Winner. Follow on Instagram @SloStrong, Facebook and at SloStrong.com
