Virtualmeet.net

This is the thread to post questions, concerns, or discussion on the Full Meet 7-9 March 2008.  To register please go HERE (http://virtualmeet.net/community/forum/meet-talk/134/0/)

Again, this thread is just for discussion/questions, do not register via this thread.  Go to the thread in the link posted above to register.

I'm new to all of this my only question is, is this free to compete. Thanks

Yep, totally free.

so if i decide to do this meet all i need to do the day that i do my lifting is video tape according to all of the rules on the rules page then upload it to where ever im supost to upload it

A big welcome to Virtualmeet.net Ben! I took a look at your profile, strong lifting.


Correct. If you sign up for the meet you will receive further instructions on how to upload the video closer to the meet. If you have any more questions, ask ahead. :)

Hello, all.  I recently joined and was looking forward to this meet.  Was being the operative word becasue I shold have looked more closely at the date. The meet is only one week after  I run in my second the Los Angeles Marathon.  My hips and hamstrings will not be recovered in time to put up the weight  I am used to without risk of injury.   I wish you all a PR and will check back to see the results.

Good luck,
Ryan

I'm going to have to pass on this Virtual Meet, Kris.  I've been so busy training here in South Carolina (usually with an extra 60-70 lbs on my body)to deploy overseas that I haven't even had time or energy to lift.  Doesn't help, either, that the only big gym on this side of the base was being renovated.   I will definitely try for the next one - - - I will be situated and have my laptop and camera by then.

To all the participants, kick ass and have a great time!!!

Hey Alberto! Sounds like you've kept yourself busy (and probably getting into pretty good overall shape despite not hitting the gym!). I shall try to do my best to join you for the next one (benching in May?), I was scheduled to lift in this one but the baby, new job and a two-week flu put an end to that... You'll be the first deployed meet participant, will we be seeing the wide-open desert on your meet footage...? ;)

The meet is underway with the first lifters hitting the bar today!!!

Some small last-minute changes to the judge line-up have been made (http://virtualmeet.net/community/forum/meet-talk/134/msg941/#msg941). Since enough judges were available, I decided to pull out to instead focus on the video editing and technicalities of getting the meet results out. This should speed things up considerably.

I will be using this thread to update on the meet process. I'm really looking forward to seeing and hearing how the meet went for everyone involved. It's a very special feeling to know that this weekend lifters in several countries will lift for a common purpose.  :D Thanks and good luck!

Well, I lifted and think I did OK.  I trained hard all week and didn't rest at all for the meet like I would for a real one so the poundages were a little lower than I'd hoped for.  I was expecially disappointed not to deadlift 220kg which I did easily in practice on Monday.   But such is life.  I failed when trying to video my first DL attempt at 200kg so perhaps I was a little tired for 220. 

I lifted and uploaded. did alright...PR on DL. So that was cool...

Tosha ;D

Six lifters have now submitted their lifts for a total of 53 clips and 800MB. I have only had a cursory check, but there is some excellent stuff in there! Unfortunately, there's also a few lifts that will be unjudgeable due to bad camera angles (notably cases where key bodyparts of the lifter are not visible). Those of you who are yet to lift and are not sure how to set up the camera, please re-read (http://virtualmeet.net/meets/rules/) chapter 2D. And as a gentle reminder, don't forget the newspaper. :)

Thanks everyone!
 -Kris, speaking in the voice of meet director

I'm more than happy at my performance, as I stated on the Finnish forum already.

I bombed just one lift (the last bench), but I got a PR on deads (170kg / 374lbs), so overall I think I lifted decently considering my 5 week meet prep.

We'll see what the video's gonna look like this time, but I for one am truly looking forward to seeing an excellent video (no pressure, Kris, no pressure) once again!  ;D

Speaking of which, we were talking during the meet (Kris was my camera-man) that each meet that I've attended so far has been filmed at a different gym. The first was at then Metal Gym, now Voimapuoti Gym, the second was at Kris' summer gym in the forest and this one was filmed at Punttis, the literally underground gym I train at these days (in a WWII bombshelter bunker underneath Temple Square Church (aka Rock Church, as it's built entirely of dry-laid stones) in Helsinki.

We also seem to have developed a tradition as far as postmeet food goes. It's been kebab every time, we mused over our kebabs late last night. I for one feel no need to break that one.  8)

I think that mention of camera angles was right to me.  Despite 30 minutes of fooling around, we just couldn't find an angle that was right for my cage.  I wound up with (I hope) 290lbs bench and 505lbs deadlift, missing my 525 attempt.  I'll do much better next time.  My squats were bombs.
Chris

That's the spirit Chris!

A quick update: 80 video clips from 8 lifters have hit the server. A whopping six lifters appear to have dropped out of the meet. Due to the heavy logistics involved in getting the meet set up and the video prepared, the Stone County Schools Powerlifting Team was granted extended upload time in advance. As soon as those clips are uploaded I will move this meet on to judging. I expect this to take another 24-48 hours. After that, the judges will have one week to finish judging during which time you will be able to follow the now customary counter of their progress.

Stay tuned!  ;D

All clips should now be on the server, but I still need to have the status of a few missing video clips confirmed. If everything goes well, the meet will be with the judges tomorrow.  ;D

The meet has now been passed to the judges! You can monitor the judging progress in the box at the top of each forum page. Since each judge faces 9 rounds and we have three judges, there are 27 rounds to be judged in total. The judges will try to finish the judging within one week, i.e. by March 21st.

I for my part will begin to work on the video editing to create another smashing video as a small tribute to all of you 17 lifters who made it all the way! Speaking of which, the list of lifters (http://virtualmeet.net/community/forum/meet-talk/134/msg941/#msg941) has now been finalized by striking out those who could not lift or who just didn't show up for the meet. Better luck next time.  :)

The judging has proceeded by leaps and bounds over this weekend, 21 of 27 rounds are now judged (78% done). Thanks Ryan, Joseph and Timothy! :)

Another update: as those of you following the meet judging process may have noted, we are still five rounds short of wrapping this meet up. I'm looking into what the status of those rounds are to get a ball park estimate of when the judging phase may be finished. If everything proceeds smoothly from here, you can expect the final results about mid next week.

Can't wait to release this, plenty of good action! In the meantime, Happy Easter everyone and thanks for your patience! :)

The meet is now fully judged. It is now time for a certain meet director (me) to roll up his sleeves and get the results out.   ;D

That'll be out by tomorrow....... right ::)

Congrats to everyone who competed and can't wait to see the final video.
Also a big thanks to the judges for devoting their time and effort.

Only if you are willing to take over the video editing and get it done by then. :)

Let's write some code for that  ;D

For each video clip take random seconds then glue them together; ;D

Sure why not, we'll call it the 'Random Video Generator' or RVG for short. :o

That could produce some pretty interesting results, could be quite interesting actually.

On a more non-geeky note, I will do my best to wrap this up by next week's Wednesday. We have again learned a few valuable lessons regarding how we can improve this whole experience from the participants' point of view for future meets, but I shall return to those issues when the dust has settled.

Really appreciate all the work meet organizer and judges are doing! Great thanks folks!

The meet results will be out this week, but won't make it for Wednesday. It was a noble goal, but due to a very hectic schedule I was unfortunately not able to find the needed time to finish everything on such short notice. We're getting there though. :)

Hey folks, I have to offer my sincerest apologies for the slow turnaround for this meet. Last night, I generated the final results with the meet playlist, but some manual tweaking here and there still needs to be taken care of. Life is spinning pretty fast at my end at the moment and time is a real commodity, but I'll keep pushing forward.

The meet has been released! (http://virtualmeet.net/meets/200803pl/) As usual, the edited meet video is also available on YouTube (http://youtube.com/watch?v=Zyc2D4G2jvM). Please note that the rankings have not yet been updated to include this meet.

Once again, sincere apologies for the long time it took to get this out for you. Despite the increased automation that takes care of most of the menial tasks, it still took about 15 hours of work after judging to wrap it up (much of which went into creating the edited meet video). Finding that kind of time has been a real challenge of late.

It's 3am, so I will return tomorrow with more comments on the meet and the upcoming bench meets in May. Right now, I just want to say thanks to everyone for taking part! All questions, thoughts and comments on this meet are warmly welcome in this thread.  :)

Great job Kris and the judging team! Congratulation to all lifters.

Great meet, thanks.  I'll get the camera better next time on the SQ and hopefully put some weight on my numbers.
One question for the judges: what caused my 2nd bench to fail?
Thanks!
Chris

I will now start to write a script to pull the rankings (http://virtualmeet.net/rankings/) from the database. I should have them out for you within a few hours if everything stays calm (i.e. the kids don't wake up for another screaming session...).

This meet will cause some big changes in the rankings both in terms of entries and high scores. ;D Meanwhile, the impatient can always check their scores manually using the rankings calculator (http://virtualmeet.net/rankings/calculator/).

The script is almost done now, but it still lacks the ability to generate the video playlist and totals rankings. It's almost 4am, so I will wrap that up tomorrow. Meanwhile, here's an unofficial dump of the latest rankings for the individual lifts:

http://virtualmeet.net/tmp/unofficial.html

The deadlift ranking is particularly impressive! Can't believe the progress Matt has been making here... but he needs to keep that up if he is to keep Coach Boone and Chris at bay.  ;D

Having this script is such a relief, up until this meet I did the rankings by hand... that's tedious work indeed.

EDIT: spotted one mistake in the rankings stemming from the pound bodyweight of one lifter having been imported into the kilogram bodyweight field. We indeed do not have lifters weighin 276kg (608.5lbs)...  :o

Finally.

The official rankings (http://virtualmeet.net/rankings/) have now been updated to include this meet.

This meet was not any more time consuming than the others, but being chronically time deprived it felt like a massive undertaking. In the end, I had to cut sleep back to 3-4 hours for the last few days to push it over the edge. On the upside, much of the work went into importing all meet data into the database (previously lifter data was hand-coded and the first meet only existed as text files) and refining the meet automation scripts to also handle creating the final results and rankings. In a nutshell, our infrastructure is now in a pretty good shape and I am confident that we will be able to handle the upcoming meets in May with much faster turnaround. Ultimately, we are aiming at cutting down the meet release process to one week after the last clips have hit the server, a goal I hope we will be able to reach this year.

Enough said for now, thanks again for your patience folks!  ;D

Well done all.
Matt, could you do me  a favor and suffer some setbacks? Nothing painful or permanent, just something to make sure I can surpass you by December. ;-) just kidding, keep pushing, I'm chasing.

A big congrats to everyone.

My goal for this meet was to put up some new PR's and not bomb out on any of my attempts.  I was successful at one of those but still managed to bomb out on two attempts, which isn't all that bad, smaller jumps next time and maybe take a little longer breaks between attempts might help for the next meet.


Well, hmmmmm, let me think about this..........  ;D
We are all here to motivate one another, so just try and catch me  ;D
If I do suffer any set backs from here on out, I hope you know I'm going to blame you now  :D  And I know you'll feel bad.......

Well done everyone! This was a really good meet. Virtualmeet is starting to show it´s true potential for the powerlifting community.

I hope that me and some of the other lifters from Täby AK can join you in the deadlift meet later this year. Sadly we are hold back by the IPF(SSF) rules here in Sweden in attending PL and BP meets.

I also hope to see chris lift in a meet in the near future... ;D

Indeed. And we are hard at work on improving it. Some news on where we are going are expected to be released over the next few days.


Sadly so. As the lifting members of our community knows, I submitted a request to the IPF on March 4th to clarify whether IPF lifters participating in our events may face sanctions, especially in regard to rule 14.9 in the IPF Constitution:


I received a reply from IPF president Detlev Albrings on March 9th that the issue has been passed on to their Disciplinary Committee, but as of yet no word. I will continue to keep those lifting with us aware of the situation and will go public with their response as soon as it arrives. The Swedish IPF-affiliated Powerlifting Federation, who have their own rule additions, took the position (http://www.kolozzeum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=97396) (link in Swedish) that their lifters are not allowed to lift with us. BUT, this only affects powerlifting and bench press events and they specifically said military bench events are ok. So Olle, how many Täby AK lifters are hitting it in May? ;)


If near future means summer/autumn and chris means kris you're in luck. I haven't had time to hit the gym for the last two months, but on Saturday I will begin my comeback training with Måns. Am considering starting a journal for this, but not sure whether that is the smartest thing to do under my current time constraints.  ::)

I'd like to thank all the organisers for all their work in setting this up and for the opportunity to take part.

I'd also like to congratulate the participants on some good numbers, especially Matt of course.

I accomplished more or less what I set out to do but the timing and events before and after prevented a real balls to the wall effort from me.  I'll do better next time.  I'm training hard and improving gradually.

I have an incredibly dumb question, it may be because I've never done any real world meets but, what would be the purpose of that kind of rule?

Now I have to go see who owns that that real world meet I was thinking about doing. ???

EDIT: oh yeah the whole reason I came over here.
Kris, I commend you on using original licensed music. They really make the videos belong to virtual meets, and some what, you and I think that is awesome. Plus the music rocks in general.

This rule used to prohibit competition on all levels in non-IPF sanctioned events, but was changed in 2005 (http://www.powerlifting-ipf.com/IPF%202005%20Congress%20Minutes.pdf).  The Swedish IPF-affiliate still retains that form of the rule on which grounds they have declared that their lifters are not allowed to compete with us in the bench press and powerlifting. Naturally, I can't speak for the IPF, but I think this statement by lifter representative Eliot Feldman (http://www.usaplforum.com/cgi-bin/usapl.pl?noframes;read=623) from just after the rule change says a lot regarding their intentions (my emphasis):


My (biased) interpretation is that we do not fill the criteria of arranging international meets in the sports sense of the term (i.e. elite lifters going for world championship titles). But, as a typical internet phenomenom, Virtualmeet.net breaks these conventional boundaries by arranging meets that are international in scope BUT local/regional in level (in most cases anyway). This rule could really be read either way in our case, which is also why we pro-actively contacted the IPF headquarters to clear this up. The last thing we want is to get anyone into trouble for competing with us. In any case, this rule does not affect IPF lifters who only compete at local level meets.

I'll keep you updated. For now, the best thing we can do is to acknowledge the potential risk. We have posted clear notices on the meet sign up page for the May bench meets. I also notified all lifters privately before the March meet (http://virtualmeet.net/meets/200803pl/).


If it's not the IPF (or the meet is local), you should be in the clear. To my knowledge no other federation maintains this kind of rule. But you may want to peruse their rule book just in case.

If anyone finds any rules that prevent competing with us, please let us know so that we can notify our lifters about it. :)


Appreciated. Luckily good royalty-free music is available for $30-$50 US dollars a pop. Once our videos have some serious exposure, I would love to offer garage bands the opportunity to send in their material for use in our videos. That would both give us some very cool novel tracks (rough edges don't hurt one bit for our genre!) and the artists an opportunity to get an appreciative audience. I wouldn't mind giving them some prominent space on the meet page too. Personally, I have the greatest respect for those musicians who toil day after day to improve. Come to think of it, that's not a whole lot different from working the barbell in the basement. :) We'll see how that goes... for now royalty-free is the name of the game.