An invitation came this week for your loyal scribe to journey to Cecelia, Kentucky and photograph the Powerlifting State Championship. This was a completely new experience for me, a guy, who buys his paint in gallons because the 5-gallon pails are too heavy.

When I arrived it took a few minutes to get acclimated to a large gymnasium transformed into a gigantic weight room filled to overflow with muscle bound young men milling about waiting to show their stuff. Schools, big, and small, from all over the state including the big boys from Trinity, a school, that has a new six million dollar state-of-the-art weight lifting facility and full time professional trainer.

Former Trigg County football coach, Curtis Higgins, had his Fern Creek team there also. It was large to say the least. I got my quick tutorial from Trigg’s Coach, Coby Lewis, as to what would happen so I could plan my photographical of attack.

Thirteen weight classes with many lifters from many schools in each class all going at once; but I only needed to get the Trigg guys, so all I needed to do was be everywhere all day. “No problem, Coach, put me in.”

The morning started off with the bench press part of the competition, with the floor covered with all that that entails. I ran around looking for kids in black shirts laying on benches with red faces.

Turns out, black is a popular color for weightlifting shirts and all weightlifters have red faces, some darker red than others, but red nonetheless. Once spotted, I had to push through thousands of pounds of spectator muscle, dodge the three judges, and get the shot in time to run to the other side for the next shot.

Photographing football games is like setting in a Lazyboy compared to this stuff.