Three Weeks Out

Three weeks from right now I’ll probably be helping pack things up as Bodybuilder Hubby’s bodybuilding contest comes to a close.  Our first Figure-on-Friday-Night experience will be over.  On Saturday, by 10pm, we’ll be on hour 15 of day 2.  But Saturday night is one of my favorite parts of the whole thing.  By that point, we can pause for a bit, look around at the audience and the competitors and just enjoy the show.  We’ll have gotten to see winners congratulated, hear friends and families cheering and, hopefully, just generally be surrounded by happy people.

At this point, however, three weeks out, I’m in my home office alone, trying not to freak out too much about how much has to be done in the next three weeks.   You ever get to that point when you have so many things to do that you feel almost paralyzed to do any of it?  So you end up writing a blog?  Here I am.

This week I’ll be finishing the design for the t-shirt and putting some updates on the website.  Hopefully I’ll have some new ads to put in the contest program, the thing I know will take up the most of my contest-prep hours.

I had a bunch of ideas that I wanted to try out for the contest this year – things to make it even more of a show for the audience.  Bodybuilder Hubby (who, of course, sees things more from the competitor’s standpoint) didn’t think there was a need to make any big changes.  Why fix what’s not broken?  Well, I’ll push for my ideas next year again anyway because even not-broken things can be made better.  For right now, though, I’m glad to not have those other things to worry about.

The registration is still going really well, a handful of new ones each day.  It’s hard to say how many we’ll end up with total.  Last year we had a total of 106 competitors, and 25 of those waited to register until the weekend before the contest.  Close to half of the registrations came in the last two weeks.

Why people wait, I have no idea.  Maybe they’re waiting to see if they end up in as good of shape as they hoped?  To compete they’d have had to commit to training and diet months before, so who knows.  Maybe it’s just a procrastination thing.

I’ll be most curious to see how many first-time competitors there will be.  Bodybuilder Hubby was already competing when I met him, so I don’t know what that thought process was like for him to decide to get on stage that first time.  I would imagine it’s a nerve-wracking decision for most people.  There’s nothing easy about putting yourself out there for other people to either (or both) pick apart and praise.  I’m a little proud of people who are willing to try it out.

My favorites are the women who come in competing as masters (over age 35) for the first time, and it turns out they’ve only been working out for 6 months, but they feel good enough about their progress – and about themselves – to show off.  Love that.

Good luck to the newbies, and to experienced competitors as well.  I know your next three weeks will be busy too.