I was super excited to compete at the Hookgrip Spartakiad competition in Philadelphia on October 4. It’s always fun and exciting to travel out of the country to compete. My family and I were having a good time shopping and passing time waiting for the big day. The morning of, I woke up feeling awful! I was puking, experiencing diarrhea, excruciating abdominal pain and cold sweats. I had no idea...
Birthday Record at Variety Village Open
After returning from a 6th place, not so good performance at the IWF Junior Worlds Poland June 11th by her personal standards. Maya competed at the Variety Village Open on her birthday July 4th and breaks her clean & jerk record of 112kg/247lbs with 115kg/253lbs. She totalled 200kg and won the best lifter award for pound for pound strongest female. Happy Birthday Maya!
Young Olympic Weightlifter has Pan Am in Sight
Original Source: Tough Competition Magazine Maya Laylor lifts over 400-pounds on her best competition days. As an Olympic weightlifter, she trains up to six hours a day perfecting the snatch and clean and jerk. Both lifts combined have 18 total incorrect movements that any athlete is susceptible of committing. It is a sport with so much attention on the weight and heavy lift aspects that many...
Publicity
Soon after the Winter Lift, I had received email after email from the Share newspaper which is Canada’s largest ethnic newspaper, The Toronto Star, and CBC news. They all wanted to interview me and hear about my story as a young and upcoming female Olympic weightlifter. The Ward and Al Show on SiriusXM Satellite Radio also contacted me and asked if I will be able to talk on their show this coming...
Things Don’t Always Go As Planned
Usually I have to lose weight for my weigh-ins, but this time I actually had to gain weight for this year’s Junior Canadian Championships in Winnipeg for the 75kg weight class. As a strategic move, our team’s head coach decided to place me in that category the night before the competition (I’m usually a 69kg competitor and 75kg is the next class up). At that time, my weight was 69.5kg and the...
Being a Female Olympic Weightlifter
As a female lifter I have to take many things into consideration for competitions, like having your “monthly cycle” on the day of an important competition! Today I had the Ontario Junior Championships and it didn’t go as well as I would have liked. For the last few weeks I was having great training sessions and thought I had this competition in the bag. But I thought wrong! Days leading up to the...