Every morning, Mirabai Chanu records the training sessions on her mobile phone.
Every night, the iron woman watches it before hitting the bed. Stopping and starting at various intervals. “I note the areas where I feel there’s progress. And carefully go through the problem points,” Mirabai says.
In sync, Sharma relies on his readings to make adjustments to the daily plan. “I have a programme set for each of the 125 days,” he says, referring to the number of days left until Mirabai’s competition day in Paris. “Within that, depending on how the sessions and recovery go, I make little tweaks to the plan daily.”
The Tokyo Olympics silver medallist’s latest self-assessment is reassuring, more to herself than the outside world. “All okay,” she beams.
It’s been a while since Mirabai has uttered those words to describe her state of being. Although, when she stepped on the stage in Phuket last week during the World Cup, it might not have appeared so.
The tournament in Phuket was Mirabai’s first since the ill-fated Asian Games last year, where she got injured, pushed for a medal but fell just short. It would also be her last competition before the Paris Olympics.
In that sense, her tally of 184 kg when taken at face value does not scream ‘I am back’. By the end of the competition, where all her Paris rivals were present, Mirabai finished 12th. She was 37 kg behind the combined total of North Korea’s Ri Song Gum, the winner who isn’t eligible for the Olympics because of anti-doping rules, and the Chinese duo of Hou Zhihui (217 kg) and Jiang Huihua (208 kg).
Mirabai was also behind the lifters from Thailand, Japan and Venezuela. With the Chinese in a league of their own, it’ll be a battle between Mirabai and lifters from these countries for the rest of the podium places. All of them were in the high 190s, pushing towards the hallowed mark of 200, which would all but assure a medal at the Olympics.
In this context, cheering for Mirabai’s 184 would be like celebrating Rohit Sharma for a simple act like getting off the mark. But in their typical manner, Mirabai and coach Vijay Sharma remain quietly confident.
“We had gone to test ourselves,” Sharma tells this paper. “We could have left after the weigh-in. But at the Asian Games, we had a problem on the stage. This time, it was important for Mira to get the confidence that there isn’t any problem and she can lift pain-free.”
That, Sharma and Mirabai say, was their primary goal in Phuket. Not how many kilos she could lift. For, Mirabai has spent the last year-and-a-half nursing different injuries. And after the Asian Games, she had to virtually stop training.
The injuries to hip and shoulder meant that while she could pull off lifts up to 80-90 per cent of her capability, when she had to go all out, the muscles wouldn’t take the load, Dr. Dinshaw Pardiwala, who treated Mirabai and will be India’s Chief Medical Officer at the Olympics, said.
“For nearly five months, I had to take complete rest. I didn’t do any exercise for the lower body. All the muscles, strength and endurance, I had lost it all. I had to condition my body all over again. In a way, you have to tell your muscles what they have to, and can, do,” Mirabai explains.
When she returned to training in the last week of January, Mirabai said ‘it felt like I was starting from zero.’ For the first month, it was just strength training: power snatch, power clean, squat and pull. Gradually, she began to lift weights but even then, it was only up to 40-50 percent of her capacity.
Rather than being obsessed about the total, the initial plan, according to Sharma, was to just execute one lift in each of the two sections, snatch followed by clean and jerk. During warm-up, they considered the idea of attempting all six lifts. “We wanted to test our limits and see if she remained pain free,” Sharma says.
She did. And for Mirabai, that was more critical than winning a medal. “If by training this much I lifted 184, then it gives me confidence that I am headed in the right direction,” Mirabai says.
Between now and August 7, when Mirabai competes in Paris, the target is to increase her strength to a level where she can lift at least 205 kg. It’ll be 2 kg more than her tally at Tokyo, which led her to a silver medal.
“There isn’t a single athlete except China, North Korea who won’t participate, who can lift more than 200 kg,” Sharma says. “Maximum they have touched is 200. So, at Paris, each of them will have to come up with a new lift. We just have to do what we have done before. We have lifted 205 many times. 203, too.”
The mark, which looked distant at the start of the year, seems within reach for Mirabai as well. “I will do it. If I do more than 200, then (medal) ho jaega,” she says. She pauses and adds: “If I remain relaxed, fit and reach my best, then a medal is sure.”