Back from the April RKC

MY RKC EXPERIENCE: APRIL 2006

Pre RKC: I am in St. Paul, and Cheri and I went to the Meet and Greet in the Hospitality suite. This room was full of testosterone and muscles, but I did not see any of the attitudes normally associated with a room full of A type personalities. Everyone seemed to feel the way I did, excited, but nervous about day 1. The big snatch test was on everyone’s minds. For myself, I thought I would come in weighing 198 in order to snatch the 1.5 pood (53 lbs.) 64 times. But a couple of weeks out, I weighed 202-205. I thought about dieting down, but in the end, thanks to reading several posts on Dragon Door, (Thanks Mark Riefkind) I realized I would be better served by eating well, and coming in strong. I have to admit, not trying to diet down kept my stress levels down, and I was really excited to start my snatch test. I ran into Tom Shook, the other RKC hopeful previously trained by Ken Black. He had taken a seminar with Ken in the past with his dad. I was not at that seminar, so we had only heard of each other from Ken. I also met Kenneth Jay from Denmark who was conducting a study on the effects of kettlebell training on untrained persons vs. traditional training methods. I am looking forward to his study being published. I did not stay long, but I took note that I was on Team Du Cane. As I was leaving, Pavel Tsatsouline, Kettlebell guru, walked into the room. He shook my hand and he asked where I was from. He stopped when I said, Sacramento, got a new look in his face, and said, we’ve met before! He had remembered me from the Learning Exchange Power to the People/Super Joints seminar in 2004. I was very stoked that he remembered me two years after the fact. Pavel is very down to earth, approachable, and extremely knowledgeable beyond compare.

I went to bed very excited to start the RKC and hit my numbers in the snatch test!