Bad luck

I was looking forward to a great day today with the virtual meet. I bought a newspaper, made sure I had new batteries, proper lifting attire etc...

I even bought a new HP Photosmart M425 a couple weeks ago knowing that I needed a digital video camera for the meet (since misplacing the one we had). I used the 1 GB SD card from my old mp3 player. I formated the card first and then used the camera the past couple of weeks to get used to it. Everything was falling into place and working great.

I started out videoing the newspaper, then the weights, then the first two Squat attempts. I reviewed both attempts immediately afterwards and they both looked good (275, 315). I went upstairs to fetch Cameron and Justin to spot me on my last squat attempt of 345. They had to help about halfway up on it. I was disappointed, but knew it would be extremely difficult to get considering I haven't worked legs at all in the past 3 months or so.

I reviewed the last attempt to see where the lift broke down. It started to play back on the camera. About 10 seconds into the video the screen went bright red and said something like "CARD HAS WRONG FORMAT Press OK to format card". I tried not to panic, but didn't feel good about that message. I ran upstairs and tried to see if I could recover what was on the SD card.

I kept getting: "The disk in Drive E is not formatted: Do you want to format it now?"

I hit NO and tried looking at the properties on the drive - nothing worked. I figured, OK well I'll just DQ my Squat and do the other lifts. I tried formatting the SD card and that wouldn't even work. I got "There is no disk in Drive E. Insert a disk, and then try again.". I tried phsyically tweaking the card to get any life out of it, but no go. The card is simply lifeless. So I was completely out of luck with this meet. The internal memory in the camera wouldn't even come close to being sufficient.

I figured I'd do the other lifts just for fun to see what I could do without the video and ended up with 345 on the bench and 315 on the DL (365 DL attempt failed).

I am very disappointed. I was hoping to at least submit something, but the only thing that could have made the day crappier I guess is that I could have seriously injured myself which I didn't do so I should count my blessings. Sorry fellow lifters. I hope your hardware works better than mine and that you have successful lifts. I'll be there next time with a new SD card and better prepared physically as well.