Alex Hughes, who took first place in the ‘Come to the Darkside’ Olympic weightlifting meet in Springfield this past April, poses with his weightlifting shoes.
Alex Hughes, who took first place in the ‘Come to the Darkside’ Olympic weightlifting meet in Springfield this past April, poses with his weightlifting shoes.
THE DALLES — Many of us view the new year as an opportunity to finally make those changes in our lives we’ve been putting off — to break those old habits, pick up new ones, to try something we’ve never done before or revisit that old hobby we’ve let life get in the way of. While many of us set those goals for ourselves, how many of us can truly say we see them through?
Alex Hughes, a Montana native who moved to the Gorge in 2019, can say that he met his new year’s goal and then some, when he not only accomplished his goal of competing for the first time in an Olympic weightlifting competition, but took home first place in his weight class in the “Come to the Dark Side” weightlifting meet in Springfield, Ore., back in April.
“I’d never competed,” said Hughes. “I’d done some CrossFit competitions, but they were friendly, local sorts of things. I’d never done Olympic weightlifting.”
Hughes, who is also a tennis player, was a member at The Dalles Athletics club to utilize their playing courts when he made his goal and began putting in hours of hard and calculated weightlifting training. “I realized that they had a functional training room in the back, with weights, plates that you can drop and not damage the floor too bad,” said Hughes, “and when I had the New Year’s resolution that I was making — decided I wanted to compete — this event for April 28-29, had already been posted … I pretty much committed right there in January,” he said. “You kind of look around the gym, and you’re like, I need to use everything to maximum efficiency to be ready for this.”
According to Hughes, while his CrossFit background helped him prepare, lifting was not something he had truly focused on before this competition. “When you are a competitive CrossFit athlete, there is a strength component and then there’s a cardio component,” Hughes said. “A lot of their training actually focused a lot on the Olympic weightlifting component … I’d say in earnest, I don’t think I really ever focused on lifts before, until very recently.”
The “Come to the Dark Side” meet is an annual USA Weightlifting sanctioned Super Total event that is held at Eastside Barbell strength training gym in Springfield. A Super Total competition, according to barbend.com, judges the athletes’ best lifts in both powerlifting and weightlifting disciplines, including squat, bench press and deadlifts in powerlifting and the “Clean & Jerk” and “Snatch” for weightlifting.
“You take all five and you compete in those,” Hughes said about Super Total competitions. “So I’d been doing more powerlifting and had a CrossFit background, and was like, I’m just going to try all five.”
In a slightly unfortunate turn of events, when the competition took place, Hughes did not get the opportunity to compete in the powerlifting portion due to a lack of places to stay overnight, as multiple other large events were taking place in Springfield that same weekend. “We just couldn’t find a room, so the second day I didn’t compete in the powerlifting,” he said. “It’s kind of goofy, we drove down that day, drove back that night.
“Longest day of my life,” he added with a laugh.
Alex Hughes trains at The Dalles Athletic club.
Contributed photo
As for the weightlifting portion of the competition, according to Hughes, each athlete had three tries to perform both the Clean & Jerk and the Snatch lifts. “Everyone is watching you perform, you’re performing for people and demonstrating your motor control under duress, basically,” he said. “It was so much different than anything else I’ve ever done.”
With this event being Hughes’ first experience competing in Olympic Weightlifting, it left him — quite understandably — nervous, and said while he did all right in his lifts, he has some holes in his memory of the event. “I kind of blacked out,” he said, “I remember weighing in, and kind of loosening up, warming up, but my actual lifts, I actually don’t remember that much.”
In the end, Hughes was dubbed winner in the Men’s Open 96kg weight class with a best Snatch of 95, and a best Clean & Jerk of 125 for an overall score of 220.
While encouraged by the win, due to a lack of competition in his weight class, Hughes said he found the win itself less exciting than the encouragement and feedback he received from the other athletes and coaches at the event, as he competed without a coach himself. “That is their sport, that is what they trained for, and basically the overall theme was, ‘Okay, you’re strong enough that if you were to hone in your technique, [get] more specialized in the sport, you can go places,’” Hughes said. “That was kind of a game changer for me to hear that from other coaches.”
Wanting to go further in the sport, since the competition Hughes has taken on a coach, a weightlifter by the name of Evan Rutledge, whom he has followed on Instagram for several years. Sharing with Rutledge his interest in trying for a state competition and possibly breaking a couple of records in his weight division, Hughes was once again encouraged by the feedback he received. “He said something along the lines of, ‘if you want you don’t have to stop there, we can try for nationals,” Hughes said. “Hearing from a guy that I’ve admired for six years and saying ‘yeah, we can get you there,’ [my] head was spinning from that.”
Working together remotely, Rutledge sends Hughes a series of exercises and lifts to practice — which Hughes records himself performing — and will send critiques and feedback. “Coaching in general, if you got a good coach, they’ll kind of study you personally and how you take advice, and then they’ll critique the hell out of you,” he said. “It’s a lot of eating humble pie when he replies to me.”
Training in other parts of his life, Hughes recently left his job as business development and membership director at The Dalles Chamber of Commerce to be part of an intensive programing course studying software development, and hopes to apply what he learns in the Gorge. “I love to do some sort of software development, really, in just about anything, but … my stronger preferences is on working with actual hardware,” said Hughes. “The Gorge is pretty good about tech, there’s a surprising amount going on.”
Reflecting on this year’s journey, Hughes discussed the personal growth he went through committing the time, work and effort to achieving his goal and how the internal achievements are just as important as the external ones, and encourages other young men and athletes who may be seeking control and meaning in the world to give something like it a try.
“There’s something very humbling about contesting yourself against a numerical weight on the floor, that you either are going to do it or you’re not,” Hughes said. “For young men that are looking around themselves at the world and want to be tested want to find meaning once you acquire power — and power is not a dirty word, it’s just the competence and ability to navigate across the terrain — for those that are maybe needing structure, applying yourself to acquiring strength, that has been a phenomenal basis for me foundationally, to orient myself into a more productive version of myself … there’s little mini contained lessons in strength training that the carryover is immense to every other domain in life.”
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