I know one of the competitors who didn't make the final cut but just narrowly missed it, Marcus Crowder. I never competed against him because we are in different divisions as well as different weight classes. I am in the Masters division, meaning 'old' not 'great'; he is, obviously, in the open division. Likewise, I compete in what Strongman considers the Middleweight division, although it would be Heavyweight in boxing or pretty much any other sport. Crowder is a Super Heavyweight.
He is very strong, and if he's not in the finals this year, likely as not he will be one of these days.
Good luck to all, and may injuries be avoided in spite of the limit-pushing seeking of excellence.
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I put this in perspective yesterday. Picked up a very heavy plank. As in, I could barely get it off the lumber rack and carry it. Beech. 11 feet long, a foot wide, couple inches thick. Having read this post, just for interest, I weighed it. 82 lbs. Eighty two pounds. Now granted, I am an old skinny guy, but still- what are these lifters made of? 50% elephant DNA? Half Percheron? They would handle that board like a toothpick.
750 pounds? I could use them around the shop. "Joe, put the tablesaw over there"."Mike, we have some long stock to run, pick up the shaper and position it so we can feed wood through the open door." Yikes. I am in awe.
It's true that the reason I've continued to do Strongman training well into my "Masters" years is that it's just incredibly useful. We heat our house with firewood, so I cut and split about five cords a year. I can, by myself, move an oak trunk of moderate size. If cut into reasonable lengths I can flip it, or if cut slightly shorter I can put it on my shoulder and carry it. This makes it possible to handle cutting all that wood by myself. I otherwise couldn't do this job alone.
That said, one of the things you learn doing this is that the amount of weight you can lift varies dramatically by just how you have to lift it. If you want to move big weight you need to find a way to do it with a big compound lift. If you're lifting with just your arms, or even just your legs, the amount you can move drops a lot. If you get down to something like a bicep curl, even 50 pounds is challenging. But if you can figure out how to get it at least a bit off the ground, so you can do more of an 18-inch deadlift than a true deadlift, you can move a lot.
Or like the other day, when Conan was bitten by the rattlesnake, I was able to lift and carry him to the truck, and into the vet, and back out again after treatment. It's just really helpful.
Normally I cheat by lifting one end at a time, when possible.
And for those times it is not possible, steel toed boots are really nice to have on...
About Conan- my ignorance of snake bites is infinite- did the bite instantly put him on the ground? Or did it creep up on him after a few minutes? I mean, if a human got bit, could they move? Or is the pain or shock too great?
It took about five seconds for him to stop running around and lift the injured leg off the ground. I wasn’t sure what had happened at first, so I brought him inside where the light was better. I found one of the bites bleeding, and it was obviously a viper wound. I washed it with soap and hot water to try to prevent an infection— and indeed it did not get infected— but it started to swell within a minute. I carried him to reduce the circulation of the poison. He could have walked on three legs to the truck, but I didn’t want him to walk.
Now by the time we reached the vet, I don’t know if he could have walked. It was badly swollen and painful.
Now when my wife got bitten by a rattlesnake a few years ago, she didn’t even know she’d been bitten. She thought she’d stepped backwards into a sharp stick. But it barely got through her jeans and boots, and there wasn’t much venom. She had a lot of necrotic tissue and swelling starting the next day, but we didn’t go to the hospital because we didn’t know she’d been bitten until we saw the results of the venom.
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