2026 Prototype
Lift Off

26 athletes. 13 teams. 4 lifts. One unforgettable Sunday.

I PR’d my clean on all 3 attempts. My first attempt on the bench was my PR from last Sunday — and I put a 10-lb PR on top of that. Four PRs for the day. My best lifting day of my life.

Damon Walsh · After Lift Off

Twenty-six athletes walked into the gym Sunday morning. Four hours later, twenty-nine personal records had been set.

The math says that’s not possible. Twenty-six people, twenty-nine PRs — more records broken than there were athletes in the room.

But the math doesn’t account for what was actually happening on the floor.

Everyone Cheering For Everyone

Check-in opened at 7:30. By 7:45 the gym was full — competitors warming up, friends and family staking out spots along the platforms, kids running between the squat racks. There was a buzz that you can only get from a room of people who are about to do something hard together.

Standards were reviewed. Questions were answered. Heat 1 hit the bench at 8:00 AM sharp. And then the gym got loud and stayed loud for four straight hours.

That’s the part of the day no leaderboard captures. Yes, it was a competition. Yes, there were winners and trophies and medals. But the energy in the room wasn’t zero-sum. Every heat got louder than the last. Every PR attempt drew the whole gym in. Athletes finishing their lifts walked straight over to cheer on the next platform. Partner teams that had just been head-to-head with another team a heat earlier were the loudest voices in the room when those same competitors stepped under the bar.

Everyone was a little nervous going in. Everyone wanted everyone else to win. And when twenty-five other people are screaming your name and the bar is loaded heavier than you’ve ever pulled before — you find out what you actually have.

The Day In Stats

Twenty-nine personal records. Across twenty-six athletes. More PRs than there were people on the platform.

Nine athletes went 2-for-2 — PR’d on every single lift they took. Seven of the thirteen teams had both partners hit a personal best. Nineteen of twenty-six athletes set at least one new career high. That’s seventy-three percent of the field.

Combined, the room moved 12,570 pounds across the four lifts. That’s over six tons of weight, lifted in less than four hours, in a 50 East Main Street building that just hosted what is — statistically — one of the highest PR rates we’ve ever recorded at a Prototype event.

The Teams That Won The Day

Hardware On The Line

Lift winners are scored by coefficient (raw weight adjusted for age) — the great equalizer that means a 65-year-old going hard can outscore a 25-year-old going for raw glory.

Heaviest absolute lifts of the day: Mike Collette — 555 lb deadlift (heaviest of any athlete). Carla Lopez — 300 lb deadlift (heaviest female lift, also a PR).

Tony Pittman’s Sunday

Everyone Has Something To Celebrate

Twenty-nine personal records. Here’s every single one.

✨ The Sweep — PR’d On Both Lifts

Nine athletes hit personal records on every single lift they took.

🏆 New Career Bests

Personal records set on the day, by lift.

👫 Teams Where Both Partners PR’d

Seven of the thirteen teams had both halves of the team set personal bests. The community thesis in numbers.

• Marc Dobay & Abhi Das — 4 combined PRs   PR Champs
• Damon Walsh & Mark Hardin — 3 combined PRs
• Rob Scannevin & Tony Pittman — 3 combined PRs
• Liza Davis & Carla Lopez — 3 combined PRs
• Jason Fam & Nate Dubin — 3 combined PRs
• Jon Davis & Griffin Barriere — 2 combined PRs
• Shana Doiron & Alicia Cusato — 2 combined PRs

Farmers Hold — The Grinder

Open all day, available between heats. The Floater rewarded the team that hung onto the implements the longest combined. Some athletes ground out times that bordered on absurd.

The People Who Made It Happen

An event like this doesn’t happen on its own. It happens because people stepped up to organize, set up, run heats, judge, score, and clean up.

Coach Jon Collette led the charge on organizing the day — from the heat structure to the scoring system to the run of show. Coach Tony Pittman(yes, the same Tony who pulled 500 lbs that morning) handled a huge piece of the setup before the event even started. After everything wrapped, every single athlete pitched in to break it all down and get the gym back to ready-for-Monday condition. That’s a Prototype thing.

And a special shoutout to Mike Collette, who built the live Lift Off platform from scratch. It was the first time we’ve run a competition with our own custom scoring site and live leaderboard, and it made a real difference for athletes, judges, and everyone watching from home. The bar just got raised on what these events look like.

The Other Half Of The Story

Twenty-six athletes lifted on Sunday. But the gym was full of people who never touched a barbell.

Family members, friends, fellow members who just came to watch, kids who showed up for their parents, the partners who weren’t lifting that day. They lined the platforms. They yelled. They clapped between every rep. They made the room loud enough that nobody could hear their own self-doubt.

They’re half the reason there were 29 PRs. Maybe more. Thank you for showing up.

More Than A Gym

Sunday wasn’t just a competition. It was the proof.

Proof that a gym is more than a building. Proof that training together is more than the sum of the workouts. Proof that when you build a community where everyone wants to see everyone win — where it’s a competition AND nobody’s rooting against anybody — the ceiling moves up for the whole room.

Twenty-nine personal records didn’t happen because twenty-six people came in stronger than usual. They happened because twenty-six people walked into a gym where the energy was bigger than any one lifter, and nobody walked out the same.

This is why we built this place. This is why we keep building it.

See You Next Year.

The 2027 Prototype Lift Off is coming. Date TBD — we’ll be ready.

Prototype Training Systems

50 East Main Street · Westborough, MA · Est. 2012