IN EARLY 2012, I got meningitis. As you do. I was at work one day and as I was levering a bar down to test a suspension bush the bar slipped and smashed me in the nose. It was a bit of a mess but I carried on working. I’m dead hard, me!
Two days later I came down with a really bad headache at work. It was so bad, in fact, that I could hardly see anything and so I ended leaving about an hour early. Not that hard, then!
On the journey home, the lights from the oncoming traffic set the headache off again and when I got home I just collapsed on the sofa. Fortunately, my mum came over about half an hour later to drop something off and when she saw me on the sofa I was completely non-responsive. Couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, nothing.
Mum called an ambulance and after having a few tests at the hospital they confirmed that I had bacterial meningitis. Alex was pregnant with Max at the time and I was terrified I’d given it to her. Apparently, meningitis can lie dormant in your nose and if it gets disturbed it can become active quite quickly. Not everybody has it, but if you have and you have a nose injury you could be in trouble. I was off work for about two months in all and it really put me back.
This was the catalyst for making me give up the door work and as soon as I was back on my feet I sold the business. Despite the meningitis my immune system hadn’t been firing on all cylinders so a near-death experience was exactly what I needed. It was a bit extreme though!
My first competition of 2012 took place in March and was a Giants Live event called the Melbourne Classic (now the Arnold Classic). Whoever finished inside the top three got immediate passage through to World’s Strongest Man which was taking place that September. In the end I finished fourth, but a guy called Colin Bryce, who runs Giants Live with Darren Sadler, was so impressed by my performance that he took me to one side after the competition and told me that he’d make sure I won qualification. This was a colossal boost for me because I was confident that by the time September came around I’d have shortened the gap between me and the world’s elite. With that being my only barometer it was imperative that I made it to Los Angeles, which is where the competition was being held.
Colin did have one issue, though. I was now starting to bulk up a lot and if I wasn’t working or training, I was either eating or thinking about eating. Obviously, I needed to get bigger, but at the same time I had to try to maintain my fitness and mobility. Static power’s important, but roughly half the events at World’s Strongest Man require movement and if I wanted to challenge the athletes who were, perhaps, more genetically gifted than I was, I couldn’t afford to have any weaknesses. When Colin told me that he intended to get me to Los Angeles he questioned whether my mobility was up to scratch and to be brutally honest, no, it probably wasn’t. This is because I still wasn’t training for strongman and so all I did from a training point of view was to lift weights.
Even so, I was still quite taken aback by Colin’s comment and so parried it by informing him that I used to be a national swimming champion (which obviously requires a certain amount of mobility) and that I still held several records. I could tell by the look on his face that he thought this was bullshit and so I thought, Right then, Mr Bryce. Not only will I prove to you that I can move well with weights, but I will also prove that I was once the toast of the swimming world. Until I pulled that moonie and called Sweetenham a fat twat, of course.
Sure enough, when we finally got to LA I pulled out some of my press cuttings and very proudly handed them to Colin. He actually knows Mark Foster and when I’d told him that I’d broken one or two of Mark’s records he once again thought I was pulling his plonker. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he started reading the articles. While Colin’s eyes started widening, a self-satisfied grin began permeating my face, which, if it could have been translated into words, would have said, ‘What do you think about that then, eh?’
One of the reasons I was so keen for Colin to read those articles is because he was somebody I looked up to and admired. I may be a narcissist with a big gob but there are certain people in the world who make me want to shut up and listen, and Colin’s one of them. It’s the same with strongmen. I made a point, around this time, actually, of getting to know people like Brian, Thor and Big Z, for the simple reason that they were the best and I wanted to feed off their success. I also get on really well with them, which helps. Some strongmen would probably feel either intimidated or deflated by hanging around with people who are on a different level to them, but not me. If I was ever going to match, or perhaps even better, these inspirational behemoths, I had to know what made them tick, and, over the years, I’ve picked up all kinds of stuff – everything from eating habits, through to how they respond to certain situations and how they prepare for certain events. You can’t always tell what they’re thinking, of course, but being close to them means you often get a pretty good idea. Conversely, I think they’ve also picked things up from me. Especially since I’ve moved up to their level of size and strength. I’ve definitely taught them one or two new words!
When it comes to sport, Colin has been there, done that and bought the T-shirt; as well as being a former Olympic bobsledder he also spent time as a strongman and is one of the best sporting commentators there is. Ever since I first met Colin all he’s wanted to do is help the athletes get on and he’s advised me in every aspect of my life, from how to train to how I should conduct myself. Intellectually, he’s a powerhouse but what I take away most from our relationship, apart from his friendship, is his wisdom. Colin has this knack of pulling things he’s either heard or read out of thin air just at the right time and he’s a constant source of inspiration.
A few years ago, Colin spent some time with Mike Tyson and when he asked him what Muhammad Ali had over everyone else he said that Muhammad Ali was the only one prepared to swim into dark waters.
‘What do you mean, dark waters?’ I asked Colin.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘if all the greatest boxers swam out to sea, Muhammad Ali would be the one who’d keep swimming no matter what. He’d be the only one willing to swim into dark waters.’
That story of Colin’s stuck with me big time and it describes my attitude to a T. To get where I want to be I am prepared to swim into the very darkest waters and regardless of what I do in life that will never change.
Funnily enough, that’s not the only story that resonates with me that came out of this conversation between Colin and Mike Tyson. When the two of them got on to the subject of Ali calling himself the greatest, Tyson told Colin that Ali pinched that saying from a wrestler who was around in the 1940s called Gorgeous George. Being a good wrestler wasn’t enough for Gorgeous George and so he invented a persona for himself that he knew would piss off his opponents. Back then, men were supposed to be men, so in order to have the most impact, George started turning up to fights wearing frilly bathrobes and platinum blonde wigs. He even used to enter the ring to Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’. Not only would this infuriate the other wrestlers but it also gave George an immediate advantage. There was no way in the world his opponents could lose to a man dressed like that but because he was so effeminate they were afraid of going anywhere near him. It was absolute genius when you think about it and he turned the hitherto niche sport of wrestling into a huge hit. Apparently Muhammad Ali had seen George camping it up on TV one day, saying, ‘I’m the greatest.’ This obviously struck a chord with Ali and the rest, as they say, is history. That’s where he got his big-talking public persona from and helped to make him a star.
When Colin told me this story everything just clicked into place and I could see how much of my own behaviour mirrored that of Gorgeous George’s. I remembered how that public persona had come instinctively to me back when I was starting out as a swimmer – the bragging, the mind games, the flamboyant entrances … even the cross-dressing! Obviously like George and Muhammad Ali (or Cassius Clay, as he was then), I had to back up the showmanship with talent and ability, but the character also helped to give me the edge. Yet again, Colin had helped to give me an insight into my own personality.
When I found out I’d qualified for the 2012 World’s Strongest Man I almost exploded. For a start it was going to be held in Los Angeles, which is somewhere I’d always wanted to go, and at the time, qualifying for the competition represented the sum of my ambitions within strongman. I’d make a judgement as to whether I’d alter this ambition after the competition had taken place, but in the meantime, I was just happy to be taking part.
I’ll tell you something, though, it was a good job I had built my ambitions around what I knew, because when I got to the hotel and had a good look at the competition I felt like a little girl. I was twenty-four stone, for Christ’s sake, but I genuinely felt minuscule. Every single athlete seemed to be huge and when I first saw people like Brian Shaw, Hafþór (Thor) Björnsson and Žydrūnas Savickas in the flesh, I almost packed up and started hitching a ride home. Not only were these blokes tall, especially Brian and Thor, but they were also as heavy as fuck and they were all about thirty stone. A six-stone difference might not sound like much to some people, but when you add to that a height difference of about six or seven inches, things start taking on a new light. Actually, those two mammoth freaks usually block out most of the light!
I suppose it was another Arnold Schwarzenegger moment in a way, but this time it was in triplicate, and, it was in the flesh. These three athletes have all taken the title of the World’s Strongest Man and were so far and away better than everybody else it was ridiculous.
Despite feeling like a Jack Russell nipping at their heels I still thought I had it in me to get through my qualifying group and at least make it to the final, but unfortunately it wasn’t to be. I did win a couple of events – the Viking press and the squat – which I was pleased with, but it was a difficult group to get out of and at the end of the day I was neither big enough nor good enough to progress, and finished the group in fourth place. Normally they use things like barrels for weights in the Viking press but this time they were using quad bikes and given my history I was always going to win that. It was a pyrrhic victory though and sometimes you have to hold your hands up and admit defeat. It’s not something I find easy but once I get over the disappointment, the first thing I do is start looking for positives, and in this case, they weren’t too difficult to find. I was still young and, although I wasn’t big enough or good enough at the time, I had the makings of becoming a true behemoth, in every respect.
One thing I remember at the end of the competition was watching a photograph being taken with six different winners of the competition. There was Big Z, Brian Shaw, Bill Kazmaier, Magnús Ver Magnússon, Svend Karlsen and Phil Pfister.
I remember standing behind the cameraman thinking, what an absolute fucking privilege. Everybody – all the athletes and crew – were in awe of these guys and it was a great moment. Privilege aside, my one overriding emotion as I stood there watching them all was envy. Pure envy. What a motivation though.
Competitively, World’s Strongest Man 2012 really opened up the world of strongman for me. In fact, it was like discovering a whole new continent. One populated by ugly-looking giants from America, Iceland and Lithuania, who ate, breathed and slept strongman; and who, unless I did something about it, would swallow me for breakfast every day of the fucking week. It was sink or swim time again. And, as per usual, I had three choices: give it all up and be happy mending trucks, consolidate my position as the strongest man in Britain, or start eating like a horse, training like a maniac and swinging from the chandeliers before finally mixing it with the big boys. It was time to start building the beast!
The rest of 2012 was a bit up and down really. I won UK’s Strongest Man again, and won convincingly. Then I made my debut at Europe’s Strongest Man at Headingley Stadium in Leeds, and it was like the Worlds all over again. I certainly didn’t perform to my best but with Thor and Žydrūnas in the line-up it was a reminder not only of where I needed to be, but where I would be once I’d finished. I was now training specifically for strongman, at last, and that was already paying dividends. It had taken me a while but instead of just lifting weights I was training each specific event. The equipment didn’t always match, but it was a step in the right direction.