An Interview with Coach Rob, Pt. 2

by Johnny Nguyen

Long before he hit the gym, Rob Earwicker was hitting the water. He was a high-board diver, and at the age of eight he was already torpedoing himself off the board and into the water ten meters below. At thirteen he decided to use weight training to help his diving, and so he joined a local gym and did what everyone was doing: Leg extensions, biceps curls and admiring themselves in the mirror. “I was doing what the popular magazines suggested, and I thought I was the man, curling twenty pounds in my tank top.”

The gym was in England, and it was like any gym around the world – full of leotards, biceps and muscle-bound narcissists. Rob trained there for a year until one day he learned about the London Youth Games, which was a mini Olympics for kids of the inner counties. Thousands of young people participated in this event annually, competing in sports like high-board diving, trampoline and Olympic-style weightlifting. And it was weightlifting with which he identified immediately, because he was already weight training at his local gym. But the lifting methods were vastly different: whereas everyone at his gym was lifting a weight slowly and spent most of their effort staring at themselves, Olympic-style weightlifters were incredibly strong and fast, agile and athletic.

At about the same time Rob’s mom suggested that he’d join an Olympic-style weightlifting group, which held classes two to three times a week for interested individuals. And so rob walked into his first class with his Velcro lifting belt and his lifting gloves, and reached out his hand to introduce himself to the weightlifting coach. The coach reached out, but instead he grabbed the belt and gloves from Rob’s arm and told him he’ll never need these again. And that was his first lesson in Olympic-style weightlifting, over 17 years ago.

After only six weeks of training, he competed in his first weightlifting competition. Asked how he did: “I performed like bullock in that first meet. I power cleaned simply because I couldn’t do a real clean.” He admitted that his technique then, by comparison to his present, was downright ugly. “But I enjoyed it enough that I put away all the other sports and did only weightlifting from then on.”

And several months more of training allowed him to qualify for the London Junior Championship, and then he qualified for the School-age National. From then forward he won a medal at every school-age championship he entered. In 1991 he became the first member of the school-age training camp, a program that is organized and coached by national-caliber training coaches.

The big competition came in 1994, at the European Junior Championship, where he snatched 120 kilograms (264 lbs.) and clean and jerked 150 kilograms (330 lbs.). These were appreciable numbers to put overhead for a young man who was only diving off a high board a few years before. Since this competition, Rob has competed in about a dozen prominent meets, internationally and in the United States, and had done well. (To see a list of Rob’s accomplishments, visit his profile at: http://www.focusedtrainers.com/about/staff_robert.htm ).

In January 1999 he moved to the United States and became a part-time strength and conditioning coach for the Cabrillo College football team in Santa Cruz, and worked primarily with his uncle as a bartender at a small bar in Capitola, Ca. “It wasn’t ideal, but the idea was that I became a part-owner of the place.” After several years of working at the bar, Rob knew the patrons by their first names and remembered their drinks, and he was acutely aware of their situations – their perpetual complaints about things they never tried to change. And he saw that, if he continued to cater to and serve the same complainers, whiners, and drunks, he was ultimately following in their shadow. And so in 2004 Rob made a change.

While working at his uncle’s bar in Capitola, Rob had been training once a week at a weightlifting gym. It was called the Sports Palace, located in South San Francisco, 80 miles from Rob’s home. It was the closest weightlifting gym that he knew about, and so he drove 160 miles to train for about an hour once a week. This was a golden time in which he could escape the annihilative lifestyle of his bar patrons, and concentrate on something positive. It was at the Sports Palace that Rob met former FIT trainer Paul Doherty.

Literally two days after they met, Paul introduced Rob to FIT. And today, three years later, Rob is the weightlifting coach of FIT Barbell Club.

“I wake up every morning happy,” he said. “Not many people get to do the things they love.”

At the beginning of part one to this interview, I asked how it is that a man can dedicate so much of his life to a sport that showcases only two lifts. I’m slowly learning that if it allows him to wake up every morning happy, then perhaps it is a good reason for such dedication. It is a love of not the flesh and the heart but of the steel and the iron. In every way, however, this love of the barbell is tied to the person. In his own words:

“Weightlifting represents a way to better yourself as a person, to improve your skill at something, to test your mental capacity, to face your challenges, and to discover just how far you can go.”