POWERLIFTING: Easy life no fun for Nick

HAMISH BIDWELL Nick Hansen has been climbing the walls.
A runner turned bodybuilder and now powerlifter, the Hastings accountant's body is used to the feel of hard physical work. Except for the last week, when Hansen had to let the dumbells gather dust as he tapered for the Central Districts Powerlifting Championships in Waipukurau today.
"I'm foaming at the mouth," Hansen said yesterday afternoon.
"I've just had to have a week off to let everything recover and it's been bloody difficult. No exercise makes it hard to sleep when you're used to going hard at it."
Unlike a boxer, who can tuck into a few pies and burgers once he's made his pre-arranged fight weight, not training hasn't allowed Hansen to let things go entirely. Desperate to make his favoured under-100kg weight division, he says it's been a challenge trying to stay lean while not training.
"Every day at work it's a can of baked beans and a can of sardines here and another can of tuna there. I get a huge amount of stick from people at work about the diet, but I have to do it.
"I'm going to have a go at the New Zealand deadlift record of 314 kilos and that means keeping my weight down to staying in the under-100s. If I can't get it this year then, because of all the training, I'll probably blow out into the 110s next year."
With food second only to training in the list of things powerlifters obsess about, he and training partner Nathan Williams have bantered about sabotaging each other's hopes today.
"We're in the same 100-kilo division, so it's pretty competitive between us. It'll be pretty close tomorrow, or at least I hope it will, and there's certainly a bit of friendly banter there," said Hansen.
"He's threatened to poison me and things like that and I've been threatening to feed him up and make him fat, so that he goes up to the 110s. But it's been good and he's really pushed me.
"In my first competition I only got a 530kg total, which wasn't anything spectacular, but in my last comp I got 672.5 and beat Nathan by two-and-a-half kilos. That's a 140kg gain in a year, which I was pretty pleased with."
But training is not all they get up to. With a few others, they've been successful in securing Hastings the 2006 nationals.
"It'll be in August at the Hastings Indoor Sports Centre, so we're full-steam ahead organising that.
"The Central Districts comp is a qualifier for that, so we have to make sure we put up a respectable total and move on to the nationals from there."