When I finished writing this I said to Sam, “I think this might be my most boring post ever, but I wanted to capture some of the experience related to peaking.” He quipped that I could note that this post might be boring but I can point out that my life has been boring lately. Boy, is he right. 

I have been extremely disciplined for months now, being very careful with my diet and organizing my life around training. Sam and I love trying new restaurants, but as I’ve joked before, there’s no counting macros at a French restaurant. I dialed back a lot of socializing, too, because so much of it comes with food and alcohol. I can be disciplined, but when I’m hungry and haven’t had a buzz in a long time it’s just too easy for that type of environment to turn into an epic binge. Plus, training and cutting is really tiring, so I haven’t had a big desire or the energy to throw into socializing. All available energy has been going to training.

Shifting from a final strength block to a meet peak is always an interesting experience. I haven’t done it that many times, and so the experience and how I feel is sometimes surprising. It’s also different than how I felt in other sports leading up to a big competition.

In my last strength block, I was working really hard -- the intensity was high in terms of the heaviness of the lifts, and I was doing a very respectable number of worksets. Interestingly, my sleep wasn’t very good, which is probably an indicator that I was creeping up on getting overtrained, but I was able to increase weight consistently. On many nights my Fitbit reported that I got very little deep sleep. If I woke up it often took a while to get back to sleep, and I would consistently wake up early. There was no sleeping in. I was also consistently cranky. 

As I transitioned into meet peak, my sleep started to improve. The intensity was higher with peak singles and sets of no more than three reps, but Sam dropped the volume off steadily. My sleep slowly started to improve. I felt much more rested when I woke up in the morning, my Fitbit reported more deep sleep, and I was actually sleeping until my alarm went off. The Saturday before the NAPF, I even was able to go back to sleep in the morning. The crankies eased off as well but it shifted in a strange way. At first I was just moody -- happy, then overly sensitive, then grumpy again. Overall, though, my mood improved in line with my sleep. 

What’s funny is that I know to expect to feel a little lousy during meet peak. I remember when I first started training at Five Rings Fitness one of the other women who had been competing for several years checked in with me. I told her I felt like crap -- I was achy and cranky, and my lifts felt like garbage. “Oh, that’s totally normal,” she said. “Everyone feels that way during meet peak.”

I remember being completely baffled by this. When I ran track, peaking was really just a taper, so I started to feel really good and rested to the point that I would get itchy to race and want to exercise. That was always a good indicator that I was ready to go. Powerlifting peaking feels different than this. Sometimes the lifts are a battle, and you just don’t feel great. At the end of my power block I had two sessions where I felt great and despite doing a lot of work, I crushed a few PRs and felt great doing it. Then I felt like crap as I moved into lower volume and a few wicked singles. 

That was a blow to my confidence. I had waited a long time to compete -- first hoping for the invite to the IPF meet, then finding a meet later in July, and then postponing again when I got the invite to NAPF. It had a been a long time training without the opportunity to get an adrenaline-filled test. When my peak singles weren’t moving as well as they had at the end of my strength block, I started to worry about having peaked too soon and any of a number of other things that felt like they might be indicators that my performance was tanking. 

Really, this is just peaking misery. Sam reminded me of another friend who had trained at Five Rings. He was a really gifted lifter and put in all the work to be successful but would regularly fail lifts during his peaking block. Then at the meet he would crush massive PRs. I tried to keep this in mind.

I also had a few tweaks to make to my form. I had developed a bit of butt flight on my bench press that I needed to get under control. And I’ve been a little nervous about my squat depth. It’s there on my peak singles, but just barely. Sam keeps assuring me it’s just right -- the goal is not to go ass to grass but to just break parallel. But I think parallel is in the eye of the judge, so I used my last session with light squats to really practice dialing in the feeling of the depth I want to hit. Some people might really worry about any changes to form so close to a meet -- for example, I really had to start moving my feet wider apart than I had been practicing to get my butt flight under control. This doesn’t worry me so much. It’s maybe not ideal but I look at this as final refinements, and I’ve always been confident in my ability to pick up new movements quickly. You don’t learn seven events for the heptathlon and become an All-American if you can’t. 

Overall this peaking experience has felt less crappy physically than previous ones. I’ve had a few more doubts and concerns this time than previous peaking blocks, and I think 90 percent of that is having waited so long to compete. It builds up more pressure to perform because after busting ass for nine months you really want to experience success. But that’s never guaranteed. Getting to Costa Rica is not an insignificant flight, which could affect my hydration or body weight. If I have a weight spike I may have to sit in a sauna, which isn’t great for performance. Or my definition of depth may not comport with the judges. 

Working really hard for 9 months does not guarantee a good outcome, and that’s one of those shitty lessons in life that applies to a lot of different circumstances. Sometimes you bust ass, do everything right, and still don’t get what you were working for. I can, however, feel confident that I have taken care of all the pieces of the training to set myself up for success. And when I get to the meet, it’s nothing but focus, drive to attack each lift, and enjoying the experience of adrenaline and competition regardless of the outcome.

For the last year I've been coached through Reactive Training Systems, which means my meet peak process is very different than what I was used to or what Joah has done, although the experience of peaking is in some ways the same. Joah has a block structure to her training, in which specific traits are emphasized for a few weeks at a time. In my case, everything is trained concurrently, and “peaking” is simply being ready to compete.

(I should note that I don't suffer with hunger or cravings nearly as badly as Joah does, although too long of a cut has literally made me dream about sheet cake, hot dogs, and other toddler delicacies. I've also never seriously worried about making weight, thanks to always weighing in well below the 93kg limit. After blowing up far more than was smart over the past winter, I took a far smarter approach by maintaining my weight in the wake of my last meet. )

RTS mastermind Mike Tuchscherer devised a bottom-up coaching process that he calls Emerging Strategies. The core principle is that the coach's decisions follow the athlete's responses to training, rather than being predetermined by the competition calendar. To get the clearest signal from the inevitable noise of a biological organism operating in an unconstrained environment, RTS programming is as simple as possible – for each week of the development block, the training remains the same. That means the same exercises in the same order for the same numbers of sets and reps. 

As the athlete gains strength – in an unpredictable and uneven fashion, naturally – the weight on the bar has to increase. That may sound strange, but within this training structure, it’s not the absolute load that needs to be held steady but the rate of perceived exertion (a concept Mike T. popularized within powerlifting). In other words, if I’ve added five percent to my maximum squat but not to my training load, I’ve made my training load too easy and it can’t be usefully compared with what I did in the previous weeks of the development block.

When starting with Emerging Strategies, one goal is to determine the athlete's time to peak, which in most cases is the number of repeated weeks required to reach peak condition. With proper timing, the last week can then coincide with a competition. The development block is then followed with a block intended to reduce fatigue and renew sensitivity to subsequent training, among other things.

Does repeating the same workouts every week (often without adding any weight) sound dull? It certainly can be, and a sense of monotony is one of the clues that my time to peak is running out. Other indicators of a coming peak are mental fog that makes me prone to forgetting why I walked into the bedroom or to using the wrong homophone, to use two annoying examples. I've also found that after weeks of grinding away with high-RPE powerlifts I start to daydream about high-rep, low-RPE assistance work. Basically, I turn into a brick-brained bodybuilder.

My time to peak is seven weeks, which means six weeks of copy-paste training before the meet in the seventh week. The only relief from that repetition comes in the final few days of the block, when I'm finally permitted some time off to rest before the competition. Every time, I'm surprised at how rapidly I recover. In about two and a half days I'll go from grunting with each step up the stairs to bouncing around.

I had a very successful meet in May, but it wasn't until the very end of my final week of the current development block that I started to get excited about competing in Costa Rica. These past six weeks of training were reasonably successful for my squat and bench press, but puzzingly mediocre for deadlift. I don't think I actually lost strength – two deadlift variants improved a little – but I’ve added literally no weight to my competition-style deadlift in training.

The NAPF competition is smaller than many local meets and has only two other men in my division. The other American came in second at last year's Nationals and should bulldoze me, and the third man, a Costa Rican, should total far less than either of us. I do have a shot at pulling the heaviest deadlift of us three, and depending on how the meet is run that could result in a medal.

Mostly, though, I'm excited about participating in an international competition and in testing myself again. New personal records in squat and bench press look likely, and there's at least some chance I'll earn a small PR in deadlift too.

And then Joah and I will take a few days to run around with baby turtles.