Long Road to Mercy (Atlee Pine, #1)(24)

Gemini, community, sisters. Pine had had the tats put on in college. During her weightlifting career, many had remarked on the images since they had been clearly visible while she competed. Pine had never answered any queries about them. The tats were for her and her sister, and no one else.

She warmed up and hit the weights with a ferocity that was clearly channeling the frustration she was feeling with her investigation.

Multiple sets of flat and then incline bench press, military and swimmer’s press, the squat rack, deadlift, calf raises, depth charges, push-ups on one leg, regular pull-ups and then round-the-world reps that had her take her chin from hand to hand, dips, pounding the core with medicine balls, pendulum lifts with a thirty-pound kettle ball, and then a forty-pound one. Then came isometrics that had the sweat pouring off her from standing in one spot, followed by endless deep lunges with the kettles being passed under each hammy, decline push-ups, crunches, sumo squats with ass-busting dumbbells, and then she jumped rope for ten minutes, doing crossovers every fifth rep.

Then it was time for the pièce de résistance. Everything else had simply been a warm-up. A rehearsal for the real show. She wanted to do it while she was tired, otherwise, what was the point?

She loaded the plates on a bar, chalked her hands, and bent over the bar.

Pine was tall for a female weightlifter. This was an advantage and a disadvantage. From simply a physics point of view, shorter people had shorter distances to heft the weight. And shorter muscles tended to be more explosive in nature, because of the very same rule of science. But Pine’s longer muscles gave her tremendous leverage that shorter muscles simply could not muster.

She closed her eyes and focused everything she had in a way that only a trained athlete needed to. The mind ready, she needed to execute what was called the “dynamic start.” This would separate the weights from the floor. With a sudden, explosive movement, Pine performed the clean part of the lift, curling the loaded bar under her chin while simultaneously nailing the squat perfectly. She then performed the bounce, rose up with the barbell, completing the concentric phase, and, with a whoosh of released air, jerked it cleanly overhead as she split her legs performing the drive position. Then, legs parallel, she held the weights steadily aloft.

Clean and jerk. Done.

There was a lot more to the Olympic lifts than people probably thought. It wasn’t merely about brute strength. Pine had seen enormous men, far stronger than she, fail to clean and jerk or snatch as much weight as she could. You needed to be strong, for sure, but your technique needed to be flawless. That was why terms like the bounce, the concentric, the double-knee bend or scoop, the drive, the dynamic start, and the second pull were all things that had been beaten into her mind and her muscle memory. You needed to do all these things at the exact right moment and with the requisite forward and upward momentum to have a chance of moving twin columns of massive plates stacked on a bar where you wanted them to go.

She dropped the barbell, stopping it with her hand as it bounced back up, and then the weights fell back to the floor and stayed there. It was a practiced motion, one she had done thousands of times before.

She unloaded some weights, spun on the collars, readied herself, measuring her breaths, squaring her feet, chalking her hands once more. For this one she put leather lifting straps on her wrists, because the torque on those joints was going to be a bitch. This ensured that her hands and the metal would not go their separate ways.

Okay, this is for the gold. Or at least a spot on the damn team. In my dreams.

She bent down, set the wraps, and gripped the barbell with her hands spread wide, nearly touching each inside plate. She got her mind straight, because it was just as much mental as physical. Maybe more mental. She imagined the burst of force and the precise movement required to take this weight from the floor to over her head in one nearly seamless motion. The bar would initially come up to about her waist for less than a beat, and then with a powerful flick, be cast over her head, her arms straight, her butt a few inches from the floor. It was not a natural movement, and it required immense core strength and concentration. There was no margin for error.

That was the essence of the snatch.

Whoever had devised this lift, Pine thought, was one sick bastard.

This lift was, and always had been, her nemesis, her Waterloo, the reason she had not gone to the Athens Olympics in ’04. Athens, where it had all started, way back in 1896. How special would that have been? Well, she’d never found out.

Pine steadied her breathing, going longer and longer on the inhales and exhales. She was building up to the exact right timing of her last inhalation and exhalation where the snatch phase would come. It was all timing, technique, and a level of explosive strength most people couldn’t comprehend, male or female.

She performed the first part flawlessly, squatting there with her arms in the shape of a V and the weight directly above her head, her butt nearly touching the rubberized floor. Her pull, power, scoop, and second pull execution had been one of her best ever.

Only she wasn’t done.

Okay, Atlee, this is for the money. Just stand up. Couldn’t be simpler. Just stand up. One…two…three…

But when she tried to rise, things started to unravel—a tremble of thigh, a twitch of hamstring, the slightest giving way of her left triceps—and she had to drop the bar, falling back on her ass in the process.

She sat there, breathing hard, the sweat dripping down her face and onto her chest, her gaze pointed at the floor.