May 2023. Stone City Showdown II. My first competition. I showed up green — no real idea how a strongman contest actually runs, just strength and nerves. Fourteen competitions later, the nerves are gone and the strength has paperwork: a 445 squat, a 295 bench, a 530 raw deadlift. But the numbers aren’t the real education. The fourteen shows are.
Showing up is the whole game
Nobody plans fourteen competitions. You do one. Then one turns into a season, a season turns into a record, and one day you look up and you’re a veteran of the sport. Every comp on my list exists because I registered for the next one while the last one was still fresh — win, lose, doesn’t matter.
That’s the first lesson: the career is built out of entries, not moments. The guys who wait until they feel “ready” are still waiting. I competed undertrained, tired from overnight warehouse shifts, and out of my depth — and every single one of those shows made me harder to beat at the next one.
First place teaches less than second
I’ve stood on both sides of it. First place at Autumn Avengers ’25 — everything clicked, and honestly, it mostly taught me that my process works. Second at the Kratos Strength Classic taught me more. Somebody was better that day, in specific events, for specific reasons I could name on the drive home.
A win confirms. A near-miss instructs. Fourteen comps in, I don’t fear the losses anymore — I mine them. Every placing I didn’t want came with a list attached: this event, this skill, this gap. That list is my training program. No coach could have written it better, because the platform wrote it.
Experience is the real coach
Programs don’t teach you what competition day feels like. The warm-up room chaos. The event order changing your whole plan. Picking up an implement that feels nothing like the one you trained on. Fourteen shows taught me to be calm inside all of it — to execute tired, adjust mid-event, and never let one bad event follow me into the next one.
That composure is worth more than any single PR. A first-timer with my numbers would lose to me, because I’ve already made my mistakes in public, fourteen times, and stopped making them.
Fourteen also taught me who this is for. Nobody pays me to be there. Every entry fee, every tank of gas, every night of broken sleep before a show — that came out of a warehouse paycheck and a life that doesn’t pause for competitions. You don’t do that fourteen times for a hobby. You do it because competing is the point, and the rest of life gets organized around it.
Next March is number fifteen — War at the Warehouse IV, a National Qualifier. I’m not bringing hope to Sussex. I’m bringing fourteen competitions of receipts.