For women, Strongman competition is about power more than glory

On a cool summer evening, Kelly Plush plucked an empty beer keg off the ground and whipped it over her head.

And then she threw another.

And then another.

Each time, she set her feet about three feet apart, squatting behind the 25-pound keg, grabbing it and swinging her arms upward. She heaved the empty barrel into the air and let out a guttural grunt that traveled much further than the keg.

“That was a solid nine feet,” said Nate Ruhl, her boyfriend and training partner, estimating the height of the airborne metal drum.

“Need 10,” Plush said.

She had less than a month to get ready. A Strongman competition awaited, which meant she had to spend as much time as possible tossing kegs, lifting heavy stones, toting bags of sand and hoisting massive weights above her head.

On other days she might flip giant tires or pull a full-size car.

Through it all, she would sweat, cry, bleed — and be grateful for the pain.

“It's saved my life,” the 30-year-old prekindergarten teacher said.

Women athletes discover Strongman

Strongman is a niche sport, populated for years by hulking men built like SUVs attempting daunting feats of strength, both practical and peculiar.

In recent years, the number of female competitors has exploded, and while each turns to the sport for her own reasons, many women such as Plush have found a renewed sense of self lifting dreadfully heavy objects.

They've overcome depression, recovered from bad relationships, improved their body image and somehow translated that sense of accomplishment to other facets of their lives.

“Strongman's really redefining the narrative of what it means to be strong and what it means to be a woman,” said Candace Grand Pre, a 34-year-old heavyweight competitor. “I've noticed a lot of changes in how I carry myself, how I own my size and really own what my body can do.”

Like Plush, Grand Pre spent weeks training for Strongman Mania. She's a geologist by day near her home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania — the only woman at her company with a Ph.D.; also the only Strongman competitor — and toiled away her evenings and weekends at the gym preparing.

For Grand Pre and many others, winning the competition would be nice, but most admit that's not really the goal. They get something else out of the sport, something many have spent a lifetime searching for and still can't quite put into words.

“Men expect themselves to be strong, so they go out there, compete and they're just proving themselves right,” said Kim Zimmerman, a world-record holder in lifting Atlas stones — giant cement balls that weigh up to 300 pounds.

“It's different with women. We're proving ourselves wrong, doing stuff we never ever thought we could do — doing things that no one ever thought we could do.”

Battling depression, poor body image

Plush has been involved in the sport for nearly two years, competing as a lightweight. She has battled depression, struggled with eating disorders and spent years obsessing over the way she looks.

“I didn't like myself, didn't like who I saw in the mirror,” she said.

Plush remembers first having dark thoughts when she was about 8 years old, asking herself what would happen if she just didn't wake up the next morning. Her depression became more pronounced during her teenage years and she sought treatment throughout high school and college. She felt weighed down by a swirling storm of issues: poor self-esteem, myriad insecurities, obsession with appearance, fear of rejection.

The science is pretty clear on this: Young women, and particularly young female athletes, face many unique challenges and barriers, sometimes aided by sport and other times exacerbated by it.

In May, the Women's Sports Foundation, founded 41 years ago by Billie Jean King, released a third edition of its report Her Life Depends On It. Researchers combed through more than 1,500 scientific studies and found:

• Physical activity helps to significantly decrease anxiety in women, a finding not found in men.

• While boys and girls have similar rates of depression in early childhood, by middle adolescence girls are twice as likely as boys to experience major depression, a gender gap that exists until menopause. For women of all ages, exercise consistently has been shown to relieve depressive symptoms.

• Women are more than three times as likely to attempt suicide as men, but multiple studies have found that women who participate in sports are less likely to consider, plan or attempt suicide.

• Negative body image is associated with eating disorders, depression and poor self-esteem, and this body dissatisfaction in U.S. girls emerges at the age of 6. Sports participation tends to have a positive impact on body image over time.

What your body can do, not how it looks

None of this is surprising to the women who compete in Strongman.

Keeley Moffitt is a heavyweight from Connecticut currently training for nationals. She stands a hair under 6 feet and weighs 230 pounds, and sports has provided a haven of sorts. She played rugby and competed in track and field in school.

Still, in college, she said she never felt comfortable with who she was or how she looked. She was scared to be alone and found herself in a relationship that she now says was unhealthy. When she finally parted ways with the boyfriend, she emotionally collapsed.

“I remember shopping with my mom at Kohl's, sitting in a fitting room crying,” she said, “just thinking, ‘I'm the ugliest person. No one wants to date me. This is my whole life.'”

Now 25, she has been participating in Strongman for the past two years and has scored three first-place finishes. The effects aren't just physical; for Moffitt, the gym has prompted a mental and emotional transformation.

“Now I never weigh myself,” she said. “I don't care anymore. It's not what I worry about. The only numbers I worry about is what I can lift.”

Nicole DeMicco, 27, competed in her first bodybuilding competition last June. She trimmed her weight to 112 pounds, knowing she would be judged on the way her muscles looked, not what they could do.

“I was starving,” she says. “I didn't drink any water the day before and had to break up pieces of a rice cake to keep from shaking.”

Almost immediately following the competition, she transitioned to Strongman. Twelve months later, she's 18 pounds heavier, stronger, happier and said she's not as self-conscious.

“I don't have to do squats to worry about how my butt looks,” she said. “I'm squatting because it makes me stronger.”

Building confidence and independence

Dione Wessels is the chief executive of Strongman Corporation, the sport's largest governing body in the United States, and estimates there are about 5,000 active Strongman competitors in the country, more than a third of whom are women.

Wessels got started in the sport as a personal trainer and was always struck by clients who were recently divorced or felt stuck in bad relationships.

“My goal with women in the sport a long time ago was to teach women to be more independent, less dependent on men,” she said. “‘Push yourself to do things you don't think you can do.'”

Plush is a pre-K teacher and not long ago she oversaw a classroom argument. A young boy was telling a girl classmate she could never be Batman or Superman because only boys are strong enough. She showed the kids a video on her cellphone from a Strongman competition in which Plush wore a harness and pulled a U-Haul truck filled with furniture 50 feet — 10,000 pounds in all.

“The little boy was like, ‘My daddy doesn't do that,'“ she recalls with a laugh.

Prompted to make positive changes

Four days before the Strongman Mania competition was due to get underway, Grand Pre, the heavyweight geologist, ended a 12-year relationship.

She moved all of her belongings into a third-floor walk-up and contemplated bailing on the weekend competition. Ultimately, she decided to compete.

“Something about lifting really heavy weights and doing things you never thought you could translates to other parts of your life,” she said. “If I can pick up this 250-pound stone, what else is possible?”

• To see a video of women competing at a Strongman competition, visit The Washington Post website.

Strongman competition events

Arm over arm: Sit with feet against solid base, pull heavy object (like a tractor) with a rope

Atlas stones: Lift atlas 300-to 400-pound Atlas stones to various platforms

Axle press: Dead lift an axle with tires

Car flip: Flip a car

Conans wheel: Pick up a heavy weight that pivots around a fixed point and complete as many rotations as possible

Dead lift: Power lift weight

Dumbbell: Lift the dumbbell from the floor to overhead

Farmers walk: Pick up two separate implements and walk or run either a set distance or as far as possible

Fingals fingers: Lift and flip a number of steal poles

Frame carry: Dead lift the frame off the ground, carry frame as fast as possible

Hercules hold: Hold up two giant pillars of weight for as long as possible

Keg toss: Throw a number of kegs, usually of increasingly heavier weight, over a specified height

Loading medley: Timed loading of heavy objects, such as anchors, barrels, sandbags and stones

Log press: Lift a cumbersome log from the floor to overhead

Power stairs: Lift various implements up and on to one or several steps

Squat: Squat with a heavy weight across your back and lift back up

Truck pull: Haul a truck with a harness

Tire flip: Flip 1,100-pound tires as fast as possible

Yoke: Life a weight across your back and carry as fast as possible