The Email to British Weightlifting
December 2025
I stared at the laptop screen. I've got to write an email to British Weightlifting. I am not going to the English Masters Championship. I've got to do this today — otherwise, the start list will be published. I don't want to see my name there.
Over the past two weeks, I dropped the bar multiple times during training. The first one landed on my right knee; two days later, another hit my left thigh; and finally, the bar, weighing 65% of my body weight, dropped onto my lower spine as I missed the snatch.
Looking back at my diary, I ran three cross-country races with the club, a 24-mile fell race in the Lakes, and a 50-mile trail race in North Devon, which was on top of clocking 40+ km of training mileage a week over the preceding 8 weeks. My body was not recovering properly from fatigue.
It was not that I wasn't aware of it. I did plan it myself. Because I thought I could do both. I run and lift at the same time all the time, so why can't I do both…?
Despite all the things I wanted to convince my head, the dark bruises on my legs and the bleeding on my back were shouting in my ears that this isn't going to happen. For the first time in my weightlifting journey, I was struck by the fear that I might drop the bar on my head, causing serious injury on stage.
I sat in my room alone with the laptop. The dreaded email — sent. OK. I am feeling so much better now.
But once the relief wore off, a question stayed behind: how did I let it get this far?
Notebooks in the Loft
The core of the problem was that I hadn't been tracking how things were going. Or rather… I had been. I had a notebook in which I logged my training each time: date, exercise, sets, reps, weights, a small note of how I felt. Half a dozen of these over the years. So the data existed. It was all there. I just never looked back at it. The notebooks piled up on the shelf, then got moved to the loft. I knew they were up there. I didn't go up there.
The digital version of the loft are no better. There are apps, of course — TrainHeroic, TrueCoach — but they are coaching platforms, not athlete tools. I had TrainHeroic for a full year when I was training with the club. I logged everything. Then I left the club, and the account was gone. I could have paid to keep it. The fee wasn't outrageous. I just didn't. I'm still not entirely sure whether that was a principled decision or just another version of the same avoidance. I just didn't care enough.
Strava for Runners
Meanwhile, on the running side of my life, none of this was ever a problem. I have been using Strava since the day I started running with the club. Fifteen years of my life as a runner are recorded in Strava. Strava is fun. It keeps all the running data easily. You can pull up any date in the past and see what you've done on that day. It aggregates the duration and distance and gives you the complete picture of where you are in the training. Strava was built for everyday runners, not for coaches. Training logs, progress tracking, and analysis are available for anyone with a click of a button on a phone. You do not need to carry a notebook or rummage through the pages in the loft to find what your time was when you ran a marathon for the first time in 2013.
So, why can't I have the same kind of app for weightlifting?
The Magic Hat
Weightlifting apps that are heavily promoted on social media are, without exception, coaching platforms dressed up as apps. For example, I click one of these apps to start a 'Free 14-day Trial'. It asks my age, gender, body weight, years of training, weakness, frequency and duration of the training, and a few other stuff, and then within a few seconds, as if a happy bunny jumps out of the magic hat, 'Your Personalised Training Programme is Done!!'. Allegedly, they use years of collective human experience from unnamed coaches, as well as a complex AI-powered algorithm. £35 per month after the Free Trial. Not only did I not see the process or logic of how on earth my 'Personalised' training is generated, but I would also lose access to the training data when I stop paying.
What a joke that is.
The Train Leaves the Station
I want Strava for weightlifting. If there isn't one, there is only one thing to do. I will create one.
I shoot questions to Google.
'Hey, how do I make an app?'
'No, I don't have coding experience.'
'What is vibe coding?'
'How do I "vibe code" then?'
I open three tabs in my laptop. Replit, Lovable, Base44. In the dialogue box in each tab, I type 'I want to build a weightlifting app that does programming, logging and progress tracking'.
Hit ENTER. Boom.
Thus, the train left the station….
Out of the Tunnel
Fast-forward to July 2026. Behind me now: £2,000 burned in the first three months with the AI magic box, sitting through JavaScript Crash Course, restarting the server and refreshing the screen eighty-nine thousand five hundred and seventy-three times, sleepless nights with teeth grinding, non-stop all-day work every weekend, hours of bug fixing throughout the nights, five consecutive rejections from the Apple App Store, and a little cry in the coffee shop as all my confidence fell away.
On 21 July 2026, I woke up in the morning to see my app had been approved by Google Play Store.
On that morning, I didn't have a list of 20 suspected bugs newly identified by Claude Code to work through. Nor did I have to look for the correct tab to click in the Google Play Console to make the right declarations. My app has been approved by both Apple and Google for distribution.
I am out of the tunnel, which once seemed like eternity.
I am no Strava or TrainHeroic. I am just a 61-year-old woman trying to enjoy sports at the best of my ability. I wanted an app to track my progress. I couldn't find one in the market. So, I made it. I have no VC backing or a team of strategists, but I knew exactly what I wanted, so I made just that.
I am planning to write about this experience in blog posts over the coming months. I would be absolutely delighted if anyone shares my views on weightlifting apps and has a go at using SmartLift. The core of the app is completely free (the AI functions are the paid part, unfortunately). And if you are a coach with at least one active athlete, SmartLift is FREE for coaches — everything included.
Instagram: @smartliftai_mobile
SmartLift: smartlift.ltd