Just to double check for the rules on the one hand deadlift: Concerning judging we will go with the rules that Walter stated and is used in the Grip championships.

Sorry for not spelling it out clearer before, but this is definitively intended to be a grip challenge. So that's the way we do it. Thanks for double checking.

I found I have 1 issue with the chin ups. I do not have a chin up bar available so I place the bar on the highest position in the rack. In order to avoid touching the floor on going down I cannot have the legs together at bottom position but have to have them apart. Would that constitute a problem?

I just re-read the rules for the chin. They do not require you to keep your legs straight down, only that you cross them. Are you able to cross the legs bent (eg. knee joint at about 90 degrees with one leg over the other behind you)?

Regarding chins: it will be a close call. I will to think of something to raise the bar higher.

Regarding chins: it will be a close call. I will to think of something to raise the bar higher.

Is the rack bolted to the floor? Otherwise you could perhaps put some plates underneath it if feasible?

If you can't come up with a working solution we can probably let you go with your current set up: as long as you don't use the floor to your advantage and go all the way down for each rep you should be good. If anything, having to mind your feet all the time will probably make the chin harder rather than easier anyway... After all, the point of this meet is to have a good sweaty time and not worrying about complex rules.

Anyone else having trouble setting up their chin?

The sign-up is now open! 

Any suggested camera angle for the chin-ups?  does it matter which side we shoot from?

Any suggested camera angle for the chin-ups?  does it matter which side we shoot from?

Good question! The judges need to see the whole body (to see that the feet stay together and that nobody is jumping off the floor ) AND that the chin clears the bar. In principle, even shooting from behind would probably work, but in the interest of seeing the chin better a side or front angle that looks reasonably clear is probably better. We haven't had any meets with chins yet so it remains to be seen what an ideal angle is. But for this meet, whatever allows the judges to see what they need will work.

Good luck in the meet! Not many participants, but this is going to be quite an interesting experience nonetheless. Hats off for those brave and healthy enough to give this a shot.

Everything should now be uploaded.

It was a beautiful day in Elkford, It was raining over night but cleared up in the morning and was a super fall day by the afternoon.  It'll probably be the last chance I have to get outside to lift this summer.

-I cut weight for the meet.  First weigh in was 85.2 and I wanted to to get it down to 85 for the squats.  Started moving stuff into the truck and came back to weigh in again once I was loaded.  Made it!
-I was a little lazy hauling out the weights, I left behind my squat stand and the collars and the 25kg plates.  Turns out the collars and 25kg plates would have been useful for the one handed lift.  I lifted everything I took out then had to call it a day.
-Had some tape in the truck that I used to make some makeshift collars with the newspaper taped to the bar.
-Forgot to take off my sweats for the front squats so had to do them a second time.

Overall, was a great day and lots of fun!

Hey Jeff, thanks for the meta info! For the rest of you, you're going to love seeing the clips for this meet...

I will try to get the meet to the judges tomorrow Wednesday. We are still one judge short provided I again hop in, if nobody volunteers I will be knocking on some doors again.

The meet is now with the judges. Måns Rinne graciously stepped in as the third judge so we are all set. As usual, the judges have one week to complete the judging.

Stay tuned!

The meet has been judged. Meet release scheduled for late tomorrow Wednesday.

Sorry for the delay. For both technical and presentation reasons, this is taking a bit longer than my original estimate. New push tomorrow Friday, let's see if we can sail this puppy to shore. A meet like this is really an eye opener in terms of meeting the challenges of organizing meets that neither fit neatly into my scripts and database schemas nor into the relative strength formulas.

Jeff, love the new avatar.

Ok, the meet has been released!

As you will see, the meet lifts have been left to stand on their own merits as there is no clear-cut way of scoring the lifts in a fair manner. Both guys did an excellent job, especially as they pioneered the event and had no idea what kind of lifts the other guy was going for... it doesn't take an elite lifter to see that many of these lifts were pretty impressive. Great stuff, good job both of you!

Please note that the meet statistics will be updated during the weekend. As this meet is completely unconventional, the stats will need to be updated by hand.

Warm thanks to Christian Burger and Måns Rinne for helping me judge this meet.

Jeff and Ramon: what did you think of this meet? Something you would do again?

Wow, nice Chins Ramon!  I really need to work on my kipping technique to get a nice smooth rhythm like yours.

I enjoyed the meet, it was fun to try something different.  The exercises selected were chosen well, the two that I hadn't tried before weren't that difficult to pick up with an attempt or two.

I can see how this sort of meet creates a whole lot of work for yourself Kris as everything needs to be done by hand.  Would it have taken you all weekend if there were a dozen lifters in this thing?

I can see how this sort of meet creates a whole lot of work for yourself Kris as everything needs to be done by hand.  Would it have taken you all weekend if there were a dozen lifters in this thing?

Done manually all the way, definitively. For this meet, as for the military bench for reps meet, the judging was done old-school (e-mail) as opposed to using the web interface. So I need to do everything by hand beginning with converting and resizing the source video, manually inputting the three judging calls for each lift into the database, handcoding each lift into the results page and add it to the video playlist. Obviously, this does not scale well...

If there had been many more lifters signing up, I would instead have spent a few nights letting my scripts know about lifts that are judged for reps and where each rep receives its own call from the judges, about lifts where there are no external weights that need to be validated and converted between kilograms and pounds (eg. the chins), about how to generate filenames for unknown lifts etc. With the scripts in place, things scale. Since the judging calls land in the database immediately and all video conversion, image generation etc. is fully automated, the tasks needed to roll out a meet are the same whether the meet has one or a thousand lifters. Copy a few files there, update a page here, create a meet image for the video player... So for any of our standard meets, it is of no consequence how many lifters enroll (unless a lot of video comes in with a video codec that my scripts can't handle in case of which I need to download the raw video, convert it to Flash video and upload it back up).

A web based meet system that will take the last pains away is on the horizon, but at the moment I am putting all the extra time I have into creating the new version 2 site to get solid ground to build the new meet system on top of; the current site is pretty much a heavily customized version of a third party forum software that has been forcefully integrated with lifter home pages etc. whereas the new system has been coded from scratch with this project in mind.

In the long run, having a truly fully automated system is obviously the only way to go. After organizing a meet a month for most of 2009, I notice that I am starting to less and less look forward to doing all the gymnastics and I am more prone to splitting the process up over two nights rather than the classic "release at 5am" model I've usually followed (which is pretty much a necessity having two young kids deserving their share of daddy time). Do a bunch of these and it will start to feel more and more like work and less like an exciting journey. But I am dead serious about getting the site up to the next level, so that's where we are going one coding night at a time. In the meantime, I appreciate your patience. 

Sorry for the long post, I guess I could talk about the technical side of Virtualmeet for a few more pages but enough is enough. 

I certainly appreciate the efforts, I've done a little web scripting and can imagine the complexity of getting this whole thing working.

So, if you've got everything pretty much automated for the regular meets then I'm not creating headaches for you if I go out and do promoting on some other forums I frequent?