Look, Phinneas!

I have a fascination with old-timey strongmen. Like this one pictured here:

His name is Alexander Zass, and he is, pending my reading of his autobiography which I had to ILL, a real cool cat. According to legend, he was a prisoner of war in WWI and secretly worked out in his cell until he was strong enough to bend the bars and escape. If that's true, then holy crap! But the point is that back then there were guys who could do all kinds of weirdo feats of strength.

I'm sure lots of guys today can do the equivalent of stuff like that. However, the key word is equivalent. Would they even bother to try to bend a railroad spike into a pretzel? Probably only in strange, foreign lands. That's why the world's strongest man competition is so awesome. They don't have just a normal weightlifting competition. They see who can lift the most twenty-stone balls of steel in the fastest time or hold crates of bananas perpendicular to their body for the longest time; you know, stuff that you might have to do in everyday life! They go all Rocky 4 with the competition, which is why everyone likes that movie anyway.

The amazing thing about strongmen of the past is that they knew diddly-squat about the concepts of safety or nutrition. But they tried, and that's the point. This might sound, uh, ageist, like I'm putting them down because of their ignorance of modern scientific discoveries about the body. It probably is. I admire them for trying to develop systems of exercise based on very limited concepts of scientific analysis. Mostly it was through personal trial and error. Oh, and also working in a circus.

I have it on good authority that some top athletes around the turn of the twentieth century had diets consisting of beer, coffee, steak, cigarettes, and stale bread; and that's just for breakfast. Yet, this wasn't a rule, because almost everyone had their own brand of diet that was specific to them. It gave them their edge. Let's see that crazy Cmdr. Thomasson lift a barrel of live moneys and carry them across a balance beam over an alligator swamp. He had fish oil and eggs this morning. I had 10w castor oil and a pint of Jack Daniels with a side of bacon. Of course I'll win. The only person who could get away with this would have been Andre the Giant.

The aspect of these guys that really interests me is their total unconformity to normal life. They were professional athletes before the dawn of individual sports in the Olympics. Even the team sports players were something of a different breed back then. But these guys didn't belong to a club. They were like the explorers who left their wives and children to go off and see what out in the unknown world could kill them. I mean, what guy thinks up the idea that getting really drunk and then running half a mile as fast as you can followed by breaking chains with your back is the best form of exercising the mind and body?

Because I want to party with that guy.