Fullsterkur 2: Halfway to Alexandria

Please welcome Zack, our guest blogger today. Below he provides his account of our recent trip to the World’s Strongest Man Super Series in Madison Square Garden. Please excuse the title, however. I had lobbied for a simple “The Strongman and the Kid, Part 2,” citing the precedent set by the highly successful “You Are Burning Me” trilogy. I tried to reason with him, pointing out the long lineage of elegant titles whose company his would join. But Zack was set on drawing out the Durrellian elements of the experience while maintaining a measure of total badassness. What can you do?

. . . . .

When I went to the Strong Man Competition in New York , I didn’t know what to expect. One thing I can say, though, is that the competitors were a lot bigger than I thought they would be.

When we got there I was anxious to see these guys. Then Jouko Ahola showed up with another man [Phil Pfister]. Jouko was really big, but nothing compared to the other man. We all shook hands and then Ryan proceeded to talk to the other men. Eventually, Jouko left to go talk to some of the competitors. Then he walked over to another group of gigantic men. He looked small among them.

After that we went to Madison Square Garden to watch them set up for the competition. They had giant tires, coffin-shaped weights, and other gigantic lifting objects. My first impression was that all the men would be very stern, but surprisingly some of them had great senses of humor. After watching them practice for a while we went and had lunch.

Later on we went to the competition. It was amazing how radical some of the people there were. Also, at least 40% of the people there were Poles who didn’t speak a word of English. The competition was awesome. These men were so unbelievably strong! It was like no competition I’d ever seen.

The Strongman and the Kid

For as long as I can remember I've been fascinated by strength. When I was little, I knew my father was strong, with biceps like baseballs, and there was something awesome about this to me. He lifted weights in the garage, ran at the junior high track, and did his Army calisthenics routine on the backyard swing set he had built out of thick pipes. These things were all part of being a father, my father, and I wanted to be like him. When I was old enough I followed his ways, and he taught me how.

But I was naturally small, very small, and I felt my difference, my invisibility. Running cross-country and track taught me how to work hard, and to like it, but only amplified the inherited ectomorphic situation. Chronic overuse injuries from running allowed the weight training I was already doing to actually work, and eventually I traded one obsessive-compulsive regime for another.

But disciplines have a way of working on you when you do the work they demand. You can’t hold out forever, and eventually what was rooted in anxiety and adolescent fantasy grew into a method of knowing something of myself. Little by little I became more process-oriented in my gym pursuits, less concerned with the minutiae of routines and macronutrient ratios. This process took another big step forward when, several months ago, I began training 13-year-old Zack, the son of one of Jenifer’s yoga clients. “The Kid” is naturally big, very big, and feels his difference, his conspicuousness. We hit it off very well, and supervising his workouts while conducting my own necessarily took much of the focus off myself. And that’s a good thing.

I was really pleased, then, to be able to invite him to a strongman competition, the World’s Strongest Man Super Series. It was to be held in Madison Square Garden and my friend Jouko would be there as a referee. Perfect.

With the Kid working his GPS, I got us through the Lincoln Tunnel just fine, though in the jam leading up to it the Prius’s energy level had dropped down to purple. I tried not to sweat it, but to be honest I still haven’t read the manual and I didn’t know what would happen if even the two remaining purple bars disappeared from the screen: either the car would stop dead in its tracks and the Kid and I would be at the front end of an impromptu anaerobic training session all the way to the Hotel Pennsylvania, or a cadre of Homeland Security agents would descend from the sky and whisk us into an underground vault beneath the New Jersey Turnpike, where we would be debriefed on a new revision to the Threat Advisory System.

We ran into Jouko in the lobby of the Hotel. His hair was long, his beard unruly, and he looked every bit a Finnish Jesus. He noted that I was not the first person to mention this, and I knew that the disguise was in preparation for his upcoming role as a washed-up Olympic wrestler in Álvaro Brechner’s Bad Day to Go Fishing, based on the short story “Jacob and the Other” by Juan Carlos Onetti. With Jouko was the great Phil Pfister, 2006 World’s Strongest Man and at 6’6” and 375 pounds quite possibly the largest human I have ever met. Shaking his hand was like being enveloped in a gauntlet of bear flesh, and a tremendous honor.

The show wouldn’t start until 7 pm, so the Kid and I hung out in the WaMu Theater as Jouko and Phil (one of the emcees) and the competitors prepared for the show. It seemed to me that these strongmen, each physically exceptional, were more a band of brothers, chieftains from far-flung districts, than a disjointed collection of adversaries. Running the whole affair was the affable, energetic producer, Colin Bryce, who was also once an Olympic bobsleigher.

Jouko is quiet by nature, but here he was in his element, among friends, and it was clear that he was held in high esteem. (Later, while ordering dinner in an archetypical New York deli, Phil turned to me and said simply, “He’s a good guy.”) Even though Jouko retired from competition years ago, this event in particular held special meaning for him. The last time Madison Square Garden hosted a strongman competition, one of the competitors was the Polish strongman Siegmund (Zishe) Breitbart, whom Jouko portrayed in Werner Herzog’s Invincible.

If you’ve ever seen a strongman event on TV, you know that these guys do some pretty crazy stuff: pressing logs overhead, pulling tractor trailers, carrying cars. Stuff that takes a little more oomph than squeaking out one more rep on your triceps kickbacks. The competition began with the Power Medley, or Flip & Carry, in which each man flips a 900-pound tire four or five times, and then hauls a 385-pound weight 50 feet to the finish line.

The next event was probably the most exciting, perhaps because it reminded me of a sick version of Musical Chairs; only there’s no music, you don’t ever get to sit down, and you’re pulling some monster poundages. Enter the Last Man Standing Deadlift, wherein each contestant takes a turn deadlifting a barbell that gets heavier with each round. Jouko pointed out that an Olympic bar, which is more flexible than a powerlifting bar, was being used because it was more dramatic for television (the event—edited down to about 43 minutes—will be broadcast on FOX Sports later this year). Starting weight was 320 kilograms; the last man standing pulled 405 kg, nearly 900 pounds.

Two other highlights included the Húsafell Stone Carry and the Axle Lift. The Húsafell Stone takes its name from an Icelandic testing stone: Snorri Björnsson, an Icelandic pastor and playwright, used the 418-pound, triangle-shaped stone as a gate to his goat pen (by Björnsson’s day, Iceland was pretty much short on wood). If you could lift the stone and carry it the 50 meters around the pen, you achieved fullsterkur, or “fully strong” status. The Axle Lift demands that you clean an axle—complete with oversized tires—to your shoulders and then press it. You do that as many times as you can in a minute. Before the show, I could hardly get my hands around the axle and was humbled to learn that it weighed 135 kg, about what I deadlifted in Jouko's gym in Hämenlinna.

It was easy to caught up in the excitement, and while we may not have been as vocal and persistent as the astonishing number of Polish-Americans fans (cheering on Jarek Dymek), the Kid and I were both thrilled by the performances, the camaderie, and the satisfaction of a full day. At one point the Kid told me he felt better about himself after seeing all these big men. I couldn’t have asked for a better experience for him.

Afterwards, feeling like zombies, we said our farewells to Jouko, escaped the streets of New York, and made our way home again on the New Jersey turnpike feeling a little grander: a little less invisible, a little less conspicuous; somewhere, perhaps, between awkwardness and fullsterkur.

The Sequel

The time is now. At last I can reveal the New Project. I know, you’re thinking, What about that sweeping Norse epic? and Where did I place my grocery list? A mere ruse, the Blue Harvest of spec scripts. No, the project whose very name I tremble with pleasure to utter, the script with a concept most high, is not the Viking-laden cleave-fest I mutter about from time to time but in fact the follow-up to American Jedi, a script I wrote with my friend Tom. The working title is I’m Killing Mr. Lucas Because He Hasn’t Released a Film on My Birthday: Being the Second Part in a Planned Trilogy of Assassination Comedies. I’d give you a synopsis, but I’m still working on the logline.

Thing is, George has a thing for Memorial Day weekend. It’s been good to him. And I understand that. You gotta make a living. So episode by episode, trilogy by trilogy, he sends his newborn films into the world, goes to Hawaii, and counts his money. That’s cool. But what’s not cool is that now, with the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, George has skunked me again. He’s had no less than 10 chances to get it right.

Ten opportunities to release a new film on my birthday, May 23. But no. Out trots Indy on May 22 and down goes another birthday in flames of bipolarity. He’s toying with me, George is. After all, these are the films that really mattered, the Lucasfilms of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series. These were Movies, and they were the ones that fired the imagination, the ones that produced that scary pounding in your chest.

At least, this is the announcement I had planned to make. It turns out that someone had the audacity to invent these Internets and, checking my facts, I discover that Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was released on Wednesday, May 23, 1984. My twelfth birthday.

Huh. That was the night—a school night—that my dad took me to see the new adventures of Indiana Jones. Opening night. How could I have forgotten? Worse, it seems that Raiders was released in June. June! I sure hope George is happy. Now he’s stolen my thesis.

Tom called me the other day, and he didn’t say so, but I think he was disappointed I’d already seen the new Indy. I explained that I had taken the Kid to see his first Indy movie. (The Kid is a really cool 13-year-old I’ve been training in the ways of iron.) My own kid is on the way, of course, and I can only imagine that 12 or 13 years from now the Jones boys will still be trotting the globe in search of mystical artifacts. We'll be there.

And, yeah, it was great. Thanks, Dad.

***Note to Lucasfilm lawyers: No need to follow up on this one. Everything’s perfectly all right here. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?