Judgment Day...(Part 1)

I just finished prejudging and have a few hours to kill until the evening show, so I decided what better way to use my time than to blog about how it went? (Don’t worry, I will still blog about the Olympia expo, but I’m a little preoccupied!)

So, yesterday, my darling friend, Christina helped me apply my first coat of Jan Tana (thanks, Tine!), which arrived JUST in time (Friday at 2!)! I was feeling ridiculously dark, and I knew I still had another coat to apply this morning. Eeeek!!! The makeup that was intended to match the tan perfectly was so dark, I couldn’t believe my skin would become that colour! Fast forward 12 hours later, and it’s definitely darker than I ever thought I would be!

We had our competitors meeting last night too. They quickly ran over the schedule of events (which unfortunately, I couldn’t hear, since people around me were talking SO loudly!) and had us wait to be heighted in so we could be organized into different height classes (and weight classes for the bodybuilders). After confirming that I’m 5’3”, I was put into the medium height division! (So there, people who call my shrimpy and say I need to wear heels so I can look a “normal” height! I’m medium, damn it!) We then waited some more and got out numbers. Lucky (or unlucky!) number 113, it is! It was great to see my gorgeous friend, Sophia (vote for her to become Status Magazine cover girl here!), for the first time in 12 weeks! She’s worked REALLY hard to get to this point, and you can definitely see her hard work! Life changing!

Luckily, since bikini was going to be on a little later in the schedule, I got to sleep in a little bit today! A little too late, to be exact…the organizer estimated that we’d be on stage around 11 or 11:30, but when I told Layne, he estimated between 2 and 3! And I had to start eating 6 hours beforehand. I suppose I should have had enough time, but it seemed each meal got pushed back 10 minutes until I was cramming my face just before stage time. Hmm. At any rate, I thought I looked OK (except the horrendous makeup, which made me look like an alien crossed with a drag queen crossed with some sort of monster…), and before I knew it, it was time to hit the stage!

There were 19 of us in our class, and we lined up in the hall just outside the stage. We entered from the side of the stage, stopped on the X, hit our poses, and lined up on the other side of the stage. Sounds simple enough, right?

(Well, one more thing I learned at the meeting was that over-the-head poses were forbidden, so I really had to change my posing routine, since most of them had my hands above my head! Some federations allow it (I’m pretty sure I can do it for the WBFF show next weekend), but this one apparently does not! Arg! Anyway, that was the least of my worries…)

So, I went up there and did my thing. It was almost definitely less clean than it had been in practice (trying to make sure I’m on the X, etc. Oh, and spinning around on CARPET floor! I had never expected a carpeted floor on stage!), but all in all, I thought it went OK. I went to my spot in line and kept a smile glued on my face. Interestingly enough, I didn’t feel nervous, but my lips were shaking like a Polaroid picture! (LOVE that song!). Kelsey Byers (a fitness model I met at Olympia) told me that everyone shakes, and no one in the audience can tell, so that’s what I kept telling myself. It was so uncontrollable that it was actually really frustrating! But I did my best not to let that show.

Anyway, they began doing callouts, which is when the judges ask groups of competitors to the front of the stage so they can compare and rank them. Generally, the first callouts are the judges’ favourites, and it gets progressively less favourable as the callouts go on. Well, I was in the last group of callouts! The LAST group! Meaning the judges HATED me for some reason! I know they haven’t given us our official placings yet (I’ll find that out in a few hours!), but that was really crushing to hear, especially since a lot of the girls I saw looked like my “before” picture, and one girl looked like she’d never practised a pose in her life! (I’m not trying to dog anyone, since I know all competitors worked hard to get up on that stage, but I was and AM so confused as to what was so wrong with me???) I’ll be sticking around after the competition to ask for feedback, so hopefully, the judges will be able to tell me what I should work on for my next competition. Was it just the bad makeup? Hair too flat? Or maybe, since they chose a lot of much softer girls over me, I was too hard? (I’m hoping for the last option, since if I’m going to lose for being too lean and ripped, it means I’m still lean and fit!)

I’ll keep you updated with how tonight goes and how next weekend (different federation!) goes. Thanks so much for everyone’s support throughout this whole journey! It’s really pushed me to try harder and do my best, and I don’t want to let anyone down!