Turning Lemons Into STRONGMAN-ADE 🍋
If you've spent any time on the gym floor, you've probably met Kai — one of our trainers with a habit of lifting things that seem medically inadvisable for a person her size. A few weeks ago she flew to Scotland to compete against the best Strongman athletes in the world, which was supposed to be the hard part, but what actually happened is that the two months before this competition went sideways so thoroughly and so creatively that by the end you half expect a piano to fall on someone. Kai went anyway — alone, terrified, and roughly the size of a carry-on suitcase compared to her competitors — and came home with a stack of personal records and a dozen new friends. Let's rewind to where it all started going beautifully wrong.
First, an infection with impeccable timing
On July 3rd, right in the thick of her prep, Kai ended up in the ER with abdominal pain so severe she couldn't walk, couldn't lie down, couldn't eat, and couldn't bathe herself. An infection had inflamed her lower organs all the way up to her diaphragm, which is a genuinely awful thing to go through and an almost comically bad time to go through it, given the international competition sitting there on her calendar. She was out of work and out of training for over three weeks — and if you've ever tried to keep hold of hard-won strength while flat on your back and living on not much, you know that three weeks off can feel like undoing a year of work.
She clawed her way back in slowly, because everything that used to feel easy now felt like a negotiation, and after about a week she'd more or less hauled herself back onto the rails. Things were looking up. The plan, briefly and against all odds, was working again.
Then the plan quit on her entirely
Because the universe apparently wasn't finished, her coach — her one guide heading into all of this — was seriously injured in a weightlifting accident that currently has him in a wheelchair, and just like that her guidance was gone. In the wake of all that stress, her teammate made the very understandable call to drop out of the competition too. So the support system Kai had built for the biggest weekend of her athletic life evaporated in about the span of a fortnight, which is the kind of luck that you'd be interrogating your ancestors about.
That left her with a decision that would have sent most reasonable people back to bed: fly to another country, with no coach and no teammate, and compete on the largest stage she'd ever stood on — or don't. She's in her early twenties, this was her third Strongman competition ever, and she'd be squaring off against five reigning champions on their home turf, in events she had in some cases never once practiced. Reader, Kobra Kai got on the plane.
Showing up scared and doing the thing anyway
She'll happily admit that walking in was terrifying. She knew nobody, everyone was older and wildly more experienced, and she was the newcomer by a mile. But the turn that makes the whole ordeal worth it, the part that would feel too on-the-nose if she'd written it into a movie: those five reigning champions she'd been dreading turned out to be, in her own words, the sweetest, coolest, and definitely the strongest group of women she's ever had the pleasure of competing against. When she hit an event she'd never done before, they gathered around and coached her through it — pointers, tips, the whole crash course. She flew to Scotland expecting rivals and came home with a dozen friendships scattered across the planet, which is a much better souvenir than a keychain.
The part where she casually moves furniture-sized objects
Now for the numbers, which land differently once you remember Kai officially weighed in at 123.3 pounds — just shy of the weight of a rottweiler.
She squatted 140 kilos, which is 308 pounds. She log pressed 60 kilos overhead, or 132 pounds, which is a full person's worth of weight going straight up over her head. And her proudest moment, deservedly: the yoke. If you've never seen one, a yoke is a heavy steel frame you balance across your shoulders like a squat bar with loaded posts hanging off each side, and the event is exactly as barbaric as it sounds — you pick the whole thing up and walk it as fast as you can without letting several hundred pounds steer you into a wall. Kai's was loaded to 180 kilos, or 396 pounds, and she moved it 24 meters in 20 seconds, a performance she generously describes not as a "run" but as a "speedy waddle." This device is based off of an old piece of farming equipment that was hauled by oxen, so to imagine her filling in for an ox and carrying this much weight for this distance means she was doing some heroic underselling.
She placed 9th, and before that number lands the wrong way, here's the context that matters: the entire spread from 4th place to 10th came down to a small handful of points. This was a razor-thin field of elite athletes, she set personal records right across it, and she did all of it without the coach and teammate she'd counted on. Her official one-line review of the experience: "10/10 would definitely do it again." Next time, she's got her eye on bringing home a trophy to hand to the West Coast family — and after watching her turn a two-month disaster into a career highlight, betting against her seems like a great way to lose money.
Welcome home, Kobra Kai. We're proud of you, we're inspired by you, and we're just a little bit scared of you, which we mean as the highest compliment we've got.
Proud of you is an understatement,
Your West Coast Fitness Family
PS: It's Labor Day, and we're open regular hours today, so come move something heavy in solidarity with the American worker. And if you're curious why the traditional way to honor labor is to take the day off — and what any of it has to do with why we exercise in the first place — we wrote about that last year, and it still holds up.
PPS: If you'd like to be coached by someone with this level of grit and determination, stop by the front desk or fill out our personal training questionnaire here. Results may include exceeding your wildest expectations and donning a badass fitness nickname.
