One of the quirkiest highlights of my pursuit of the sport of Olympic Weightlifting occured in my days as a student at Loughborough University. I had been told by university staff that I would not be permitted to utilise the university's weight room for a period of four days during one Easter Holiday. The facility would be shut and that was that! I had nowhere else to go.
On the last day before closure, I was determined to find a way that I could let myself in. It turned out that all I needed to do was to slip a bent fork between two doors and lift a bolt.
Getting access to the weight room was one thing but being able to train undiscovered was another. My solution was to let myself in at midnight, or thereabouts, and train in the dark. My only light was a street lamp some 50 metres away.
You will appreciate that Olympic Weightlifting is generally a noisy sport. So, for fear of being discovered, every lift was lowered to the floor, or the racks, without a sound, and every disc loaded on the bar was tightly collared to prevent clanging. Give it a go sometime, maybe training without making a sound will catch on! Certainly you will expend far more energy training this way.
On one occasion while engaging in this silent midnight training, I had a visit from a university security guard. It was a moment of fear and trepidation when he tested the door and shone a torch through the window. I was ready for this and had positioned my training platform in a part of the room not viewable from outside.
Of course, it might have been good for me to take four days off from my everyday, 5 hours a day, training regime. But that was not the point! Back then it was unthinkable that anything should interrupt "training". These are the moments in a sporting career that test your determination and resourcefulness, and they add to your own self-belief and sense of invincibility.
So why the strange title to this article?
Well, it's a funny thing how your senses are sharpened when the clatter of the day gives way to the quiet of the night, when you are all alone and the strangest of thoughts can run unhindered through your head.
And so it was, while I sat on a chair between training sets in that midnight darkness at Loughborough University, that my heightened senses were overwhelmed with just a very few sensory inputs. I could hear the sound of my own breathing, and as I sipped my usual training fluid, I could smell the chalk on my hand and the milk in the carton each time I raised it to my lips.
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