Survival of the fittest of the fit

“I have been kicked out of several gyms for grunting and bending bars,” said James Thomson, the stocky, sturdy, 23-year-old heavyweight initially favored to win this year’s Strongest Man Competition, held this past Saturday, March 28, at The Body Shop on West Fifth Street.

Instead, the title of “Chico’s Strongest Man” went to a 6-foot-5, 280-pound 25-year-old from Red Bluff named Brendon Page, who deadlifted a whopping 600 pounds—more than twice his weight.

The 250-pound Thomson—who pulled a hamstring muscle about halfway through the almost 4 1/2-hour-long competition—attempted 600 pounds on his third turn deadlifting but failed. He had a successful second-turn lift of 500 pounds. Thomson’s original plan was to “open” at 650 pounds; his deadlift best is 755 pounds.

“I basically did that second lift on one leg,” offered the intense, likeable Thomson. “Deadlift requires a lot of core strength. I was really just using my back. I was doing a ‘stiff-legged’ deadlift.”

Thomson—a Chico State senior in sociology from Southern California who holds state and national records in powerlifting—was one of 16 men, aged 19 to 40, who took part in Saturday’s competition, in the categories of lightweight, middleweight and heavyweight. Two women, Julie Thompson and Robin Sinclear, competed in a separate women’s division.

All entrants were required to take part in six demanding events: clean and jerk, progressive squat, farmer’s walk (requiring competitors to walk as fast as possible across the sunny Body Shop parking lot and back carrying, in the case of the heavyweights, 200 pounds in each hand), tire flip, deadlift, and iron medley—the last a three-part event consisting of an abridged version of the farmer’s walk, the tire flip and the carrying of a nearly 300-pound stone across the parking lot.

Two competitors—lightweight Manny Diaz and middleweight Mike Laney—had to drop out of the competition partway through due to muscle injuries.

The rest of them sweated and grunted through the day to cheers from the sizeable crowd and against a backdrop of rock music pumped through loudspeakers—both inside the gym, where the clean-and-jerk, squat and deadlift events took place, and outside on the parking lot asphalt, where KFM 93.9 took its place among a gathering of food and fitness vendors ringing the blacktop.

At one point during the clean-and-jerk—known as the “king” of barbell lifts because of the large amount of weight being lifted above one’s head—Thomson’s mother, who had come up from Southern California to watch her son compete, leaned over and offered her recollection of going to one of James’ competitions, in Texas, where she saw another competitor in the clean-and-jerk fall backwards with the weights over his head and “put a huge hole in the wall behind him.”

Accidents happened Saturday as well. Nineteen-year-old, 330-pound Humboldt County heavyweight Sherman “Big Sherm” Norton took a nasty spill about one-quarter of the way into his farmer’s walk, with both him and his 400 pounds of weights landing on the parking lot pavement with a loud thud. Norton later explained that he had sprained his ankle three weeks earlier, and it just gave out during the farmer’s walk.

Norton did finish the competition—his first strongman competition—but did not place.

For his part, Thomson limped admirably on his injured leg through the tire flip, which involved flipping a nearly 700-pound tractor tire end over end across the length of the parking area.

Thomson, a good-natured man, was sanguine about not winning the division. “I ended up getting third,” he said. “That’s just what happens. Brendon—he’s a good competitor. He’s got a good spirit.”

Thomson credits getting involved in weightlifting with keeping him out of trouble while growing up “in messed-up neighborhoods in LA—the so-called ghetto.” He works out seven days a week, three to four hours a day, at The Body Shop, where he looks for “whatever I can find around to lift, like stones,” and can be seen “push[ing] trucks and cars around in the parking lot and around the block.” He is happy to serve as a role model for the kids and adults who gather to watch him train and seek advice.

“The more you respect your body,” said Thomson, “the more you need to take care of yourself—you don’t need to do drugs or party. I don’t go out and spend till 2 or 3 in the morning doing drugs, because I need to take care of my body.”

Body Shop owner Jeff Paull, who oversaw and emceed the strongman competition, summed up Thomson this way: “He’s one of those guys that, outside of the gym, he’s really mild-mannered. But put a weight in his hand, and he’s an animal.”