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By Mal Irwin
Many years ago, I considered myself the up-and coming champion of the future. However, as is usually the case, sadly, study and work intervened to distract me from training. To be quite honest, I never forgot about my lifting career; just never had the time or often, the place. Bar and weights cannot be carried on aeroplanes.
My full-time training effectively ended in 1974, at the age of twenty-one. I carried on whenever I had the chance, eventually selling my own Archer weights when I decided I would be too busy to ever train again. Bodyweight bloomed to 83kg, from trying to live the life of a professional geological consultant. My wife has a photo of me next to a bottle tree in the Domain at Sydney, forming parallel curves.
However, life provide little opportunities to catch up on what was thought lost. I got a
Government job! Starting in 1983, and through 1984, I carried on some good training with Trevor Walz on his Olympic-standard set, resulting in some good totals (110 + 135; 140 c&j).
Then in 1985 I had a big dam investigation in Proserpine, North Queensland. Proserpine really is only about halfway up the North Coast, but for all practical purposes (FAPP, a handy abbreviation) it is about as far as most tourists want to go by car. It is a Victorian enclave during the winter. From my point of view, it was a fairly handy place. The shire clerk was a part-time swim coach, while his wife ran a gym and aerobics classes and as her main interest, trained racehorses. The gym had plenty of basic gear for heavy work. Best of all, Proserpine is little over an hour north of that Central Queensland lifting mecca, Mackay. I was able to sneak away for weekends to train on Eleiko bars at the North Mackay Citizen’s Youth Club, with the assistance of Bill Odger (many years before Gary Langford chose that sunny clime for his abode).
The end result, and the best, was a third at the 1986 States, with a 105+137.5 as a light 82.5kg (78kg, exactly). In the interim I had picked up a seventh Intervarsity Title at 75kg with 102.5 and 132.5 in Newcastle. One month later, my first son was born, weighing 4.7kg and restless. So the lifting went somewhat on hold, with squats in the garden shed, and power cleans on the lawn. It got so bad that I dislocated my elbow hanging nappies at 5 am one day after power jerks the night before.
The big motivator to get serious was the advent of the World Master’s Games at Chandler in 1994. I was dismayed when on trying out at Townsville one day in 1993, I snatched only 87.5 and had a mighty battle to jerk 110. Self-disgust was the spur: only two years earlier, I had snatched 95 and jerked 117.5 while training at Norm’s in Rocky.
History conspired to repeat itself. A major dam investigation in the hinterland of Mackay started late in 1993, carrying on till August 1994. There was a concurrent job studying the coastal geology, so I stayed in Mackay (at a place serendipitously called Langford’s Hotel), and trained with Bill Odger again (and later, with the champion himself). This was very productive, with rapid progress towards my 1986 training weights.
And as they say, the rest is history! Far from making 137.5 for the Master’s (that is the old 303lbs), I over did my overhead work to strain the supraspinatus tendon in my right shoulder. For nearly two months after achieving 130 at the 1994 States, I could not clean a weight, let alone do overhead work. Nonetheless after the lowly start in 1993, I consider that 100 and 130 were not bad weights at age 41. I had managed to do these lifts several times in "comebacks" through my twenties and early thirties. The question is can I repeat them in the late forties, let alone the fifties?