RKC Weekend

Posted by Steven on May 19, 2012 | 0 comments

If passion is to suffer then there was a whole lot of passion being held in one little gym. Having gone through it now, I would sign up for another RKC weekend without hesitation. It’s impossible not to be moved by the comrades around you. There was some amazing heart on display.

I could write a small novel on everything I learned and the overall experience. However there is no way to do justice to the weekend with simple words on a screen. No matter how much I type it’s impossible to experience the 650ish 40kg swings of the first day. The thrill of pushing through a stalled press to hit a new personal best while Pavel and Rif look on. Not to mention sitting down and sharing a meal with the very people that inspired you to never accept a life of pain. Seriously the Saturday dinner was the best part of the whole certification for me.

Training for RKC was hard, mentally more than physically. I had to accept the fact I was good enough to be called RKC. In my mind I was still that sixteen year old kid reading Power to the People while waiting for the pain killers to kick in so I could get some sleep. Being an RKC was something to be dreamed not achieved. Other better people could accomplish it but not me.

The week before leaving for St. Paul was the hardest. That little voice we all have was whispering “you’re not ready, you’re going to fail, you can’t do this” every night before I went to sleep. Funny to look back at it now. In my mind earning that RKC would be like climbing Mt. Everest. I nearly inhuman feat. Oh it did not help when I stumbled on a Dan John interview where he talked about how hard it was for him to get though his own RKC. No mortal wants to hear a demigod struggled at the very activity they are about to undertake.

It did not matter how many other people believed in me, and so many people did. I had to prove it to myself that I deserved those three letters that meant so much to me. Prove it I did. While I missed getting the certification in the end after crushing all the skill requirements but only managing 95 of the needed 100 reps for the snatch test, it will just take a video of getting to 100 plus a 90 day wait and there will be one more RKC in Omaha.