So I’m on the final lap of contest prep and I’m feeling the
strain. In my head I can hear Colin Bryce yelling “take the strain” as he is so
famous for doing at World’s Strongest Man. If he was here I could assure him
that the strain has been taken, and soon it will be over for a time and I
cannot wait.
For all intents and purposes, the hard work is done now. With
two weeks before contest time, trying to move the needle any further along will
probably be counter-productive or cause injury. So there’s a part of me that
gets to hit the brakes a bit and look back on the last 12 or so weeks of
training and seeing how far I’ve come. I could train all I want in the next two
weeks but I’m not going to make myself more ready for this contest. Sure I’m
going to have some good workouts and maybe up the cardio a bit, but the time
for progression has passed and now it’s time to reap the rewards of my labors.
Oh have there been some labors.
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| I present to you the face of fatigue and progress. |
That’s the hope though, for everyone isn’t it? That our
plans work out. That I will be able to present the best ‘me’ possible and that
be good enough for a podium finish. That all the hours and the hundreds of
thousands of pounds will pay off as a title, a medal and my name on a list of
people called winners.
But at what cost, glory?
I’d go over a list of my nagging injuries but what’s the
point? If its on my body it hurts right now. Some things more than others, for
sure, like my left ankle which barely moves right now and is good for about
five minutes of activity and then it begins to hurt. Out of a healthy fear of
making it worse, I haven’t practiced truck pull at all the last several weeks,
even though I got my shiny new Spud harness! If my ankle goes out, let it go
out when I cross the finish line. Then, I can be injured, but not before.
Here’s hoping that strategy pays off.
For some reason every joint on my left side is in some degree of pain, I
can only attribute it to the many years in the wrestling world where you ‘work
left’ so the left side of the body tends
to absorb all the punishment.
In short, everything sucks right now. I can barely sleep
because I’m in so much discomfort. When I wake up it’s hard to walk and getting
down the stairs each morning is an exercise in humility. Climbing up the stairs
later is just embarrassing. Things crack and pop when I move and unlike years
past, those cracks and pops have started to hurt now. I wince each time my
knuckles crack now, and I used to do it for fun. My knees pop in, out,
sideways…most of the time I’m just glad to have them. They certainly get the
job done when called upon in the gym, but regular daily life is sometimes a lot
to handle.
I’m really not a fan of eating a whole lot and if I have to
eat one more chicken breast I might become a vegan. I simply cannot eat a gram of
protein per pound of bodyweight (sorry every workout magazine every) let alone
two grams, so I’m happy when I get close to half a gram per pound and most days
I’m not even that. Somehow while gorging on chicken, untold quantities of beef,
the occasional meat that isn’t chicken or beef and lots of rice, I’ve managed
to lose at least 20 pounds. Not bad at all for one mired in the muck of
strongman training and not properly fueled! Probably my love of Pop Tarts kept
that from being 30 pounds.
Now my back has begun to hurt. Just a constant, dull pain.
Right in the everything! Heat helps, ice helps, sometimes nothing helps and I’m
sure that my chiropractor could help but if you remember the first paragraph,
now is not the time to be making major changes. I’ll be seeing him soon enough,
but I don’t want to get adjusted, massaged and shot up with Serapin and lose
the edge that brought me PRs on my deadlift and squat. That probably sounds
insane to some of you, but I think most of you will get that.
It’s totally a holding period, just maintain and don’t get
hurt. Then it’s me putting my effort on the line in five events that I honestly
think I should do well in. That’s the beauty of competing though, it’s all
about putting MY BEST EFFORT out there, and damn what my competitors do. True,
I’d love to beat them all, and plan to, but until the judge calls me up to
compete, I can’t worry what the other guys are doing. It doesn’t matter if the
field is five deep of twenty deep, competing in strongman is about putting your
best out there. In my mind the pressure isn’t about winning as much as it’s
about showing the world what I’m capable of doing and hoping that it’s just a
little bit more than the other guys.
My fear isn’t that the other guys will deadlift more than
me, my fear is that contest day comes and I’m not ready. There are a thousand
contests out there and if all that mattered was winning I could go cherry-pick
contests with shady judges and shallow fields. I didn’t wake up everyday the
last three months to claim a hollow victory. I’m not there to be the best on a
given day, I’m there to be my absolute best THAT DAY and if it’s not good
enough I’ll come back stronger next time.
But I know my best IS good enough, and I feel sorry for the
fellas that have to line up against me. I feel sorry for anyone that has to
deadlift against me. The only way I won’t win hands down is because they went
deep in the mountains and found some bad motherfucker that eats live animals
for breakfast and he yokes the bar up. Truck pull? I will drop the rope and run
a sprint with the truck if I can. If my hurt ankle breaks off I will drag my
leg behind me and pull twice as hard. I don’t care. I might lose every event,
I’ve done it before. I don’t care one bit about losing every single event if
that’s what it comes to. I’ll zero every lift. I’ll fail to get the truck
moving. I’ll manage to screw up everything, but the one thing I will not do is
fail to show up. I might look like a wild animal out there, but no one will be
more intense and no one will be more focused than I am.
I’ve got too much invested in this thing to fail. Failure is
about letting yourself down, and I’m proud of myself and how far I’ve come.
Just in this one training cycle I’ve added 100 pounds on my deadlift. Who you
know does that? Proud to be drug free. Proud to pray every day before I lift.
Proud that I take time to help people in the gym around me. That’s what being a
strong man is about; doing things the right way and sharing the gift of
strength with those around me.
So now is the time for a little reflection to get that
competitive fire started, but not let it go to full on forest fire. I’m just
biding my time until it’s time to release everything onto the world for 60
seconds, five times. Everything boils down to about five separate minutes of
maximum effort.
And I welcome it.
A great read.
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