Men's Journal

Ladies and Gentlemen! A Sight to Behold: The World’s Fourth Strongest Man. A Physical Specimen Capable of Pulling a 30-Ton Fire Engine, Deadlifting an Astounding 905 Pounds, Overcoming a Traumatic Childhood and Devastating Injuries. He is Single-Minded in His Quest to Claim the World Title. Presenting the One and Only Derek Poundstone.

By Paul Solotaroff

All right, stop already: Just stop right now, before someone gets badly hurt. There’s 800 pounds on that Olympic bar, and he says he’s going to jerk it from the floor to his navel — the equivalent of hoisting a Porsche Boxster by its fender — 10 times without stopping? Sure, no one’s pulled that much weight for that many reps, but is that any reason to risk life and limb in a ramshackle gym in Connecticut? How many blown discs and torn pectorals does Derek Poundstone need before he finally starts paying heed to the laws of physics?

One rep… Two reps… Three…

Right. Well, those looked easy, but then again, they should: He’s deadlifted a single rep of 905 and racked up countless records on his march to power as America’s strongest man. Still, why crapshoot with his lumbar spine weeks before the event he’s trained a lifetime for, the World’s Strongest Man show in Malta? Now is when he should be taking it soft, doing just enough to keep his quadriceps firing, which is no small thing when you stand 6-foot-1 and weigh an art-carved 330. So vast are his thighs, those 34-inch turbines, that he spends hundreds of dollars on custom-made jeans that won’t burst at the seams when he sits down. The town of Naugatuck, Connecticut, where the 28-year-old Poundstone is a cop, had to retrofit one of its new cruisers to accommodate his mass, moving the console over a foot and pushing back the bulletproof panel.

Four reps… five reps… six…

Fine, whatever. It’s Poundstone’s funeral if he strokes out or shreds his sacrum — all in the service of breaking an obscure world mark so he can post a clip online. (That’s his girlfriend, Kristin Nelson, behind the videocam, egging him on with hoarse shouts.) He’s built such a following with filmed feats of strength that YouTube offered him his own channel, the better to commune with the tens of thousands of fans buzzing about America’s Samson. For decades, his sport has been owned by Eastern Europe, by double-bellied farm boys from Vilnius and Krakow with names that read like an eye chart. Then here comes Poundstone, big, blond, and ripped, and the promoters of strength tournaments beat a path to his door, sensing a breakthrough star. They’ve sold him as the next great champion, the guy to wrest the cloud-crown of Strongest Ever from the clutches of the current dynastic champ, the scowling five-time winner Mariusz Pudzianowski. But first he has to get to Malta in one piece, and a stunt like this sure isn’t helping—

Seven reps… eight reps… grrrrrarrr!

Ah, see, now he’s hurting as he hitches the bar, his face turning cyanotic shades of blue and his lower back barking in protest. Three years ago, lifting this very amount, he collapsed to the floor in agony, having crushed two discs and the myelin sheath that wraps the spinal cord. Blood poured into his spinal column, where sepsis can brew and cripple patients by choking off the nerves. But three weeks later he crawled out of bed and set a weight-class record for his age, benching 437 just to stay in shape while his spine inexplicably healed itself, wicking away the blood with such cellular speed that scar tissue had no chance to roost. He did come out of it with chronic inflammation and a back that shuts down twice a year, but pain rolls off him like perspiration; he gives it no lodging or credit.

Months afterward, for example, he ripped a pectoral in half while doing a maximum bench, leaving a tear so big the bruise ran from his sternum all the way out to his elbow. The following week, though, he entered the Arnold Strongman Classic, America’s premier strength event, and took second against a monster field. No, physical oppression has never been his problem; it’s the other kind, the psychic version, that beats him up at night. The world title lost to Pudzianowski in 2008 when he dropped the final stone; the crass backstabbing of his fellow strongmen, who resent the endorsements that Poundstone’s gotten; the father who drove off on him, drunk and war-crazed, leaving him homeless as a kid — these are the things that grind him at 3 am, when there are no sports cars to lift and carry or jet planes to pull down a tarmac, or any other superhuman acts to stifle the ache of never fitting in or feeling at home. And so—

Nine reps!

The long bar bends and wobbles with plates while he hunts for a final rep. It’s in there somewhere, masquerading as pain; all he has to do is find that mental lever before he faints or cracks vertebrae. Fight, he tells himself, fight for every inch, though he had a personal record two reps ago, and besides, who’s keeping track? Who cares if he leaves the 10th rep off and walks away to lift another day? What difference could it make, to him or anyone else, if the limits of human endeavor stopped here?

Poundstone drops the bar with a clung! He stares through the camera, forlorn.

Oh. I see. That rep meant everything, the gulf between joy and grief. For him, there’s no glory in the grand attempt. There’s only strength — the triumph of will in action — and the weakness that everyone else calls almost.

—-

It has always been with us, this thirst for power, man as self-constructed god. The Greeks worshiped strength and built pantheons to it, immortalized the mighty in odes. In the sixth century B.C., Milo of Kroton lifted and carried a full-grown ox from one end of a packed stadium to the other, then reputedly killed the beast bare-handed and devoured it on the spot. For decades, he dominated Olympic wrestling, and is said to have ended bouts by hurling his opponents clear over the wall of the arena. His successors were sung in gorgeous verse by the lyric poet Pindar, whose reports on their feats were widely read, making him the first star sports columnist. (Pindar, who was from Thebes, later wrote odes to the conquests of Sparta and Athens, making him the first hack sports columnist.) Ancient Egyptians vied to see who could press the biggest sand-filled bags overhead. The Vikings trained berserkers — bands of blood-crazed brutes — to drag, throw, or carry boulders and tree stumps while wearing as little as possible. Screaming down the mountain in wolf-skin loincloths and emitting their wild-boar shrieks, they must have looked and sounded like the young Ted Nugent doing “Wango Tango” at the Whiskey. Erik of Norway sensibly banned berserkers in A.D. 1015, but their dread exploits, like Nugent’s body of work, haunt us to this day.

Strength obviously had its uses in martial cultures. The Norse were able to ravage much of northern Europe by deploying small gangs of raiders, not armies, and Hitler purportedly stoked his SS troops with the first generation of steroids. But muscle and its pursuit began thousands of years earlier as a path to enlightenment, not murder. The Greeks viewed their bodies as sacred gifts from the pumped-up gods they prayed to and deemed it their civic and moral duty to exalt the flesh through exercise. In India, where participants in the royal sport of kushti, or wrestling, trained with weighted clubs, strength was a dialogue you had with Krishna, the means to a rigorous soul. Muscle imposed order on the riot of nature, lent athletes the quaint but elegant notion that they had a hand in their fate. It also, presumably, got them laid, though Milo’s booty list does not survive him.

Derek Poundstone was thinking exactly none of these things when he got his first weight set as a boy. He was a kid with a storehouse of nervous energy and the sense that he was born for big things, and every afternoon he came home from class and banged out the preacher curls. There wasn’t much else in the way of diversion in his ’burb near Rapid City, South Dakota, and even in middle school, kids would stop and ask him if he wore shoulder pads under his jacket. “I wasn’t trying for size or, at that point, girls,” he says. “I just wanted to see if I could lift the whole stack, and by 14, I was toying with it.”

The younger of two headstrong, mesomorph boys (his brother, Justin, two years older, is 6-foot-3 and a Ferrigno-esque 280), Poundstone grew up on overseas bases as the son of an Air Force sergeant. His father, a demolitions-removal expert, was dispatched for long stretches to do postbattle cleanup in Panama, Kuwait, and Iraq, and even when home had the grim reserve of a man who had seen bad things. Left to their own devices, the Poundstone boys ran amok in small-town Europe, jumping off rooftops onto trampolines, breaking into factories and empty houses, and setting stuff on fire in the driveway. “One night, after dinner, I heard this whoomp in the basement and went downstairs to check,” says their mother, Colleen, who now lives in Newtown, Connecticut, a half-hour drive from Derek. “There were my boys, completely covered in soot after the gas can they’d messed with blew up.” Having to hold a job to keep food on the table — “They ate me into the poorhouse, those two” — she minded their doings as best she could and kept her fingers crossed. “I had a feeling one or both of them would be famous someday,” she says, “provided they didn’t kill themselves first.”

Though the brothers were recruited from middle school up for football and wrestling, Derek didn’t have the animus needed to knock someone into next week. A clumsy kid who had trouble making friends and paying attention in class, he spent most of his childhood on the outside looking in, even after moving back to the States and settling in South Dakota. At 15, however, he joined the Y in town and felt instantly at home with the plates and pins. “I had no one to tell me what to do or how to do it, but my body just knew,” he says. “It’s like I was born for one thing only: to move weight and push the limit of what’s been done.” Besides his genetic favors — the wrists and ankles of a blacksmith; the short-strand fibers in his arms and chest, which left him less susceptible to tendon tears — he noticed an odd quirk of personality: He was utterly indifferent to pain. Oh, he felt it, all right, the singe of lactic acid when he powered past failure doing hammers. He just didn’t care that his arms were screaming; he knew they had two reps left. “Pain is a lie your brain tells your body ’cause it’s scared and doesn’t want to keep working,” he says. “Once you know it’s fear, you learn to gut past it, and that’s where the big gains are.”

But even as he picked up steam at the gym, getting cruised by girls and building a small circle of friends, developments at home knocked him off of his pins and canceled what was left of his youth. His father, who’d done a year in the first Gulf War and returned from it haunted and sick, began drinking hard to stanch despair. (He’d boarded Kuwaiti buses packed with schoolkids burned alive by roadside bombs and seen women sliced to ribbons by Saddam’s goons.) He retired from the military and hid out in bars, where Derek and his mother would inevitably find him after a three-day bender. Eventually he left town, moving to California. “It destroyed our whole family,” says Justin, now 30, who lives in Florida and works as a retail banker. “I got into drugs and lost, like, four years; Mom had a breakdown and moved to Connecticut; and my brother was basically left on his own. For 16, he did what he could.”

Derek quit school, got a job at Hardee’s, and squatted in a vacant cabin without water, showering and shaving in a YMCA bathroom. Soon, he fell in with his brother’s friends, drinking a lot of beer, dropping a little acid and X, and sleeping through his fast-food shifts. “The one thing that kept me half-sane was lifting,” he recalls. “I was still making leaps — doubled my size in five years — and that, I guess, gave me hope.” After a disastrous summer with his dad, who by then had settled in Ohio, he got on a bus with two changes of clothes and moved in with his mother back East. It was the last time he saw or spoke to his father; a couple of years later, Dan Poundstone flipped his car while driving drunk in an Arkansas snowstorm. “I knew he wanted to die,” Poundstone says. “I walked in one day and he had a gun to his head, and I called my mom to please stop him. But I loved him a lot and do to this day.”

All of 18, he processed grief the only way he knew how, grinding out sets at the gym. He earned a GED and landed a job at a meat market, but was still “hanging out with knuckle- heads,” he says, and “worrying my mother crazy.” Then he caught a break. He was spotted working out in Waterbury, Connecticut, by the health-club version of a shaman. “I saw this kid with insane potential who was going out and lousing it all up,” says Dave Petro-Roy, a powerlifting champ who, at 60, is now breaking senior records. “I figured if I could get him to take his gift seriously, the drinking and all that crap would taper off.” Petro-Roy, an algebra teacher by day, made Poundstone his after-school project, showing him how to deadlift and squat, and beating home the notion that winners are people willing to endure what others won’t. “I’m 5-foot-6 and weigh a whopping 160, but many’s the time I’ve dope-slapped Derek for taking it easy,” says Petro-Roy. “The whole gym scatters, thinking he’ll pick me up and crush me, but Derek’s too nice to hit back. Sometimes I think that’s a problem.”

After they started training, Petro-Roy took him to a contest; Poundstone was instantly hooked. A couple of months later, still learning the basics, he entered a powerlifting show in the state and broke every heavyweight record in his age group. Bigger shows followed and more records fell. In three years, he ran out of titles to win and turned his attention to the Wagnerian agon of strongman tournaments. Hatched in the ’70s by the same producer who co-created the made-for-TV Superstars contests, the sport had evolved from its stunt-show beginnings into a biblical trial by fire: 6-foot-8 Goliaths pulling rowboats up hillsides and holding Doric pillars aloft. Poundstone, who venerated history’s giants — Louis Cyr, the Victorian Atlas who liked to lift horses overhead and push freight trains up steep sidings; Eugen Sandow, the Prussian Adonis who cleaned and pressed two men popping out of hinged barbells while touring with Ziegfeld Follies — yearned to leave his mark in the annals of strength, to do things that kids, a hundred years hence, would still be mooning over. He had no experience with the tools of the game: the ponderous yokes called Farmer’s Frames and 20-foot iron towers known as Fingal Fingers, which must be raised to vertical, then pushed over. Moreover, he was at a serious disadvantage to men a half-foot taller and 70 pounds heavier. But Poundstone had something the behemoths didn’t: a bottomless hunger for the kind of work that enabled, on pain of death, that final rep.

So while teaching himself to carry enormous clay pots up a flight of stairs, or pull a ship’s anchor across a parking lot by means of a heavy chain, he decided to even the odds a bit by upping his fitness quotient. Strength is as much about endurance as force, the capacity to work past oxygen debt and a pulse rate verging on tilt, but for most of three decades, the heart and lungs were undertrained muscles in the sport. “What was missing,” Poundstone says, “was athletes, guys who were light on their feet. I saw that if I trained with high-volume reps and really built my core and balance, I could make up what I lacked genetically, ’cause I’m never gonna be 6-foot-6.” Logging mile after mile on climbers and treadmills and lifting weights 20 hours a week, he lost fat but got bigger, packing 40 pounds of muscle on a frame once stalled at 280, and blew past the potbellied nose-tackle types who had years of experience on him.

In breakneck time, he earned his pro card and by ’04 was primed for breakout stardom at the age of 23. Then he got a call from the Naugatuck PD. He’d yearned from boyhood to become a cop and had put in an application eight months earlier. Now he’d been accepted. He took a year and a half off to learn his trade. He returned to the sport in ’06 and trained so hard that he tore those two discs doing deadlifts. When a neurosurgeon warned Poundstone never to lift again, he didn’t shun the counsel as much as stomp it senseless, winning a regional strongman show less than six months later. That spring he claimed the title of America’s Strongest Man, dispatching a stellar field by record margins, then beat the best at the ’08 Fortissimus, a Canadian show that ranks right behind World’s in international prestige. There was the last-second loss to Pudzianowski at the World’s that fall, but at the ’09 finals of the Arnold Classic the following March, he smoked all comers in the last event, lifting a circus dumbbell weighing more than 200 pounds 15 times overhead. “The second I won those titles, though, I said, So what? When are you going to amaze me?” Poundstone says. To earn the plaudits of his inner critic, he’d have to join the ranks of the Cyrs and Sandows, make the list of iron immortals by winning the World’s Strongest Man.

—-

On a foul day in august, five weeks before Malta, Derek Poundstone drives his Viper with the deafening headers into a dingy former lumber-warehouse lot in Waterbury. He pulls out a bag the size of a field locker and trudges through the door of an unmarked building. Inside, two dozen or so chalk-smudged men plod through dray-horse paces, doing crucifixes with ancient dumbbells and dropping them on threadbare mats. It’s the kind of gym women shun on sight: no soap or paper towels in the unmopped john, TVs tuned to cage-match bouts, and the jailhouse whiff of blocked libido. But Poundstone is entrenched here, and it’s easy to see why: The owner has given him a tract of floor space to park his Strongman gear.

“That’s $20,000,” he says of the array, which includes a custom dumbbell weighing 200 pounds, sleek steel logs with cutout handholds, and enormous barbells called Apollon’s Axles, with plates as big as wagon wheels. His crew of amateur strongmen, usually six or eight deep, needs a half-hour just to lug the stuff outside, where five times a week, three hours per day, Poundstone and Co. walk, jog, and scream, carrying loads that would bog down a semi. It is one thing to hoist a coffin-shaped slab weighing 380 pounds. It is another to haul it 75 feet, then turn without resting and haul it back, all the while being timed and taunted by a half-dozen bruisers in knee wraps. It is a third thing to do it on a day like this, when the heat and humidity are acts of war.

His crew, mostly guys in the hard-hat vocations with handles like Iron Mike and Little Joe, carp about the weather, saying it makes the gear slick. But Poundstone, in neoprene lifting shorts as tight as sausage casing, looks the scene over and grins. “I live for this stuff — I eat and breathe it. Pain is my dopamine rush.”

He is 40 minutes removed from a colossal lunch: a 20-ounce steak drowned in A-1 sauce; big sides of coleslaw, fries, and pudding; and the shake he made from a quart of milk and three scoops of Up Your Mass, the proprietary combo of proteins and sugars that his sponsor, MHP, puts out. Poundstone must take in 8,000 calories just to break even each day and is rarely without a cooler holding chicken breasts or a turkey grinder. It’s madness, he knows — “I’m shaving years off my life, carrying all this weight around” — and he shudders to think how he’ll feel at 40, when the come-and-go aches don’t go. He knows he’ll have to lose a quarter of his weight when he quits the sport in 10 years, or the vascular mass will turn to fat and swamp his joints and bones. He also knows he can’t train forever like Atlas on a banzai charge: the three-hour orgies of eye-bleed hell, toting fridges and thousand-pound yokes. “The average hip can take 800 pounds before it cracks in half. I walk around with 1,400, if you count my body weight. No ifs or buts about it: I’m looking at 40 years of hardcore knee and spine pain.”

Today his lower back’s squalling after Thursday’s deadlifts, and his right foot woke up swollen and stiff, the result of a deep bone contusion at the 2008 World’s. But he’s worked too hard to take time off, trained 10 months past the point of affliction for the dual goals of becoming the world’s strongest man and making the sport enormous. “We’re major in Europe and getting bigger in Asia, but America still thinks we are a bunch of bouncers towing a garbage truck,” he says. “They’ve got no idea how athletic we’ve gotten or how awesome it is to lift these things and move them around. If we developed a major star here, like Arnold with bodybuilding, we’d be as big as Ultimate Fighting.”

The analogy isn’t perfect — there’s no combat involved, which surely vexes the ghosts of those old berserkers. Nor has the sport found its Dana White, the pit-bull promoter of mixed-martial arts who’s tapped the hearts (and wallets) of young men. It has, in fact, no leader at all, and is run, after a fashion, by a company called IMG Media that produces TV shows. (The firm, a sports and entertainment packager, puts on the World’s Strongest Man series each year and sells the American rights to ESPN, which airs it around New Year’s Day.) In the 1990s, the competitors tried self-rule, forming an enterprise called the International Federation of Strength Athletes (IFSA) and mounting a worldwide tour. Founded on best intentions ­— it paid salaries to athletes and toughened the testing procedures at shows — it was unable to make a profit, and in 2008 IFSA bit the dust, dumping its entrants into a rag-tag jumble of one-off shows and prizes. Of the four events on Poundstone’s docket each year, only the Arnold, World’s, and Fortissimus pay serious money, more than $40,000 to the winner. In Europe, where the crowds and ad base are bigger, icons like Pudzianowski can actually get rich, but here Poundstone’s one of a tiny few earning a living at the sport. In a good year, he barely tops the $60,000 he clocks as a beat patrolman.

But cash never made men heft boats and boulders, and it probably never will. “I’ve watched Derek go from troubled kid to hero, and that all started from this,” says Petro-Roy, who still trains at the same gym where he spotted Poundstone and has mentored a number of kids since. “He did it because he wanted to be great, not good. To show that the things that hold you back are mental, not physical. Just watch him work out: When his body says, ‘Quit,’ his mind says, ‘Do five more.’  ”

Outside the gym, Poundstone steps to the Atlas Stones, a series of ferrous concrete boulders that must be loaded, in ascending order, onto chin-high podiums. His forearms are taped and slathered in gook to hold the comet-size orbs. He easily laps and loads the first four rocks on their plywood stands, but the fifth, weighing 420 pounds, slips and just misses his toes. The pavement buckles, forming a mini-crater, but Poundstone seethes and tightens his belt, resolving to go again. Once more, he blasts through most of the series, then struggles to raise the fifth. Hunched in a squat, the rock pinned to his thighs, he strains and shakes and turns magenta, but the thing won’t go past his navel. “Bastard!” he screams as he throws it down. “The sweat kept rolling it off!”

His girlfriend consoles him, saying the heat in Malta will be much less damp than here, but Poundstone won’t be coddled. “No excuses!” he says, then says it again. “I have to be better than that!”

On the drive home he laments the stone unturned. “That cost me the title,” he says of a similar drop at the ’08 World’s in West Virginia, where he clearly had Pudzianowski beaten and was moments from becoming just the second American strongman to win in nearly 30 years. “I can’t screw up again: There’s too much riding. The sport needs a champion who’s…”

He doesn’t finish the thought, and doesn’t need to. Pudzianowski, an exquisite physical specimen who’s strutted and clawed to five titles at World’s, is the object of equal parts awe and loathing on the strongman tour. He taunts his rivals for their less-than-Greek waistlines, wades through the crowds striking biceps poses. He and his fellow strongmen are widely presumed to be taking steroids and HGH. (Pudzianowski, who denies this when asked directly, was disqualified from the ’04 World’s after coming up positive for a banned substance.) The testing at tournaments is wildly uneven and the furthest thing from stringent; indeed, when queried in Malta about performance-enhancing drugs, the World’s founder, Barry Frank, gave out a laugh and blurted, “They didn’t get this big eating Wheaties.”

“Steroids help recovery, and recovery’s half the battle,” says Poundstone. “Are guys juicing? I assume so, but as a cop, forget it: We get piss tests for everything.”

And synthetic HGH, for which tests are useless? “Again, I don’t do it, though I get it if someone does: It grows muscle and boosts energy levels. But did Louis Cyr use when he lifted 18 men? Did Paul Anderson when he one-armed 300? I’m trying to raise this up to where it was back then: a sport of real guys doing unreal things that make regular guys want to get strong.”

—-

For ages, the Isle of Malta was used as cheap parking by Europe’s naval despots and pumped-up prophets. A sun-bleached boulder in the middle of the Mediterranean with warm blue bays and fair harbors, it was overrun by Romans, Phoenicians, and Frenchmen, who docked their ships, off-loaded their goods, and stole anything not nailed down or carved in stone. It took 4,500 years for the patient natives to seize their independence, and just one week last autumn to hand it all back to big-armed Huns from abroad.

The 30 combatants for the 2009 World’s Strongest Man crown arrive in late September, laying siege to the capital city of Valletta. They block out the sun at their hotel pool, storm the buffet tables and leave them in shambles, and break the elevators by merely stepping inside them, forcing locals to take the stairs. Among the invaders are Zydrunas Savickas, the Lithuanian bull who owns half the world records and a dozen major titles this decade; the great Pudzianowski, with his travertine torso and cohort of hard-eyed handlers; several huge Brits, led by man-mountain Terry Hollands; and a remarkable troupe of American men, among them Phil Pfister, the ’06 winner. It is, says the emeritus champion Bill Kazmaier, on hand to call the event for ESPN, the “greatest field of strongmen ever assembled.” Kazmaier, an open admirer of Poundstone’s (he sends him brawny text messages to pump him up), confesses to being guarded about his chances. “Derek’s a huge talent and the future of this sport, but it’s a beast this year,” he says. “Zydrunas came ready, and Pudzianowski’s a machine. He has no love and happiness in his life, which is why he’s still the champ.”

Unlike other shows, which cram six events into a weekend of nonstop hell, World’s unfolds over the course of eight days, favoring brute strength over fitness. Still, Poundstone handily wins his heat in the three-day qualifiers and comes out blazing in the 10-man Finals, standing a strong second two rounds in. “I’m right where I want to be,” he says, relaxed, after toppling the Fingal Fingers. “I’m the smallest guy left, but get stronger as I go. These big guys? Let’s see ’em hold up.”

Later that day, though, at the windy airport, he begins to lose poise and points. Tasked with pulling a full-size jet that is strapped to his back by a rope, he gets the 97,000-pound plane rolling but comes out of his crouch early and sputters. He makes it to the finish line, barely conscious, taking 41 seconds to go the 25 meters — a disastrous seventh-place run. “I choked,” he says. “I have to be perfect from now on.”

The next morning, he mounts a fearsome rally, pressing a giant barbell weighing more than 340 pounds eight times overhead. Just 10 feet away, though, on a second stage, Pudzianowski matches him rep for rep, before collapsing in a heap, dry-heaving. “My breath…it die,” he gasps from his knees as doctors rush over. (A medical team is on hand; competitors have died at other events, usually from coronaries.) Worse still for Poundstone, the leader Savickas hoists nine reps with ease, then pads back to the athlete’s tent, yawning as he eats an apple. For a variety of reasons, not the least of them political (for a while after its split, IFSA didn’t allow its athletes to compete in IMG events), Savickas has never won the World’s before, but halfway through this one, he seems to have cowed the field. “Nine,” mutters Travis Ortmayer, a Texan who’d battled to get seven reps up. “How is that humanly possible?”

By the end of the day, Poundstone’s race is run. He finishes eighth in the Boat Pull, an act of piquant madness in which contestants, wedged against a block of oak, yank an old trawler out of the harbor and up a metal track. The rope burned the skin right off his palms. The next and last day, marshaling his wounded pride, he blows away the crowd on a port-side deck, lifting a Mitsubishi Lancer nine times. It is a marvelous show, but this year, it won’t suffice: Pudzianowski follows with nine, then Savickas nonchalantly pulls 11.

When it is all over — after Savickas has gotten his trophy and Pudzianowksi mocks him by parading around shirtless and taunting Savickas to do likewise — I catch up with Poundstone at dinner. Disgusted with his showing (he’d been bypassed for third by an unsung American, Brian Shaw), he pledges to atone for it over the winter by coming back bigger and harder. When I ask him what the shame was in being almost the world’s strongest, he draws back his head, offended. “That’s like telling Louis Cyr, ‘Relax, don’t worry; someone else’ll lift that giant horse.’ Or telling Eugen Sandow, ‘Sit tight in England; someone else’ll bring bodybuilding to the States.’ I didn’t come this far to finish fourth.”

As Poundstone stalks off in search of a second dessert, I think about something his brother said on the phone from Boca Raton: “Derek started with nothing, and I mean absolute zero, the whole world stacked against him. But the more you put on his back and hurt him, the more it makes him stronger.” There is no weight he won’t one day move, no burden he won’t lift and clear. He is there already, on the mountainside, pushing the rock uphill. One more burst and he’ll make the summit, where Milo of Kroton and Olaf the Viking have a boulder waiting for him.

—-

This article first appeared in the March 2010 issue of Men’s Journal.