One of the things I am loving the most about strongman is that I get to do it with my partner, B. He is one of the most supportive people I’ve ever known and is a constant source of strength and encouragement for me. But we started this lifting journey for him. Let me take you back a few months…

My endo was bad and culminated in four hours of emergency surgery in December 2015. B had essentially been taking care of me for at least two months by that point. I wasn’t able to do much except go to work and come home and even that was sometimes a stretch. He had rushed me to hospital at 2am screaming incoherently in pain, tried to catch me when I fainted, held my hair back while the pain had me vomiting. He learned strategies to help me get through vaginal ultrasounds while tears streamed down my face from the pain. He had reminders in his phone for my medications because I was often not cognisant of the day or time and many days just waited and wished to die.

Then I had surgery and life became possible again. It was like waking up from a bad nightmare. It took me much longer to recover this time than the first time and about 8 weeks post surgery we decided to start working out again. B decided he wanted to put on some muscle size and gain weight. So the journey began. Training heavy 5x a week at home in our gym, eating to a schedule and weighing and measuring everything. I figured I may as well do it with him to support him, but tailor it to my own goals. He had instant success and saw results straight away.

Then came strongman. He was invited by our friend to attend class. He started googling and getting amped up for this sport. I thought I would go with him for the free trial and see what it was about and then leave him to it. Well neither of us could shut up about it after we left that first class. And this has escalated into 2 classes a week, an additional training session with our coach, Ash, me working with a strongwoman in the UK for nutritional programming (Tara is amazing!), spending our spare time scouring websites for logs and tacky and planning weekend trips away to go and watch other people compete in different comps.

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Watching War of the Titans at PTC Macarthur

The best part is that we are doing it all together. When one of us is feeling unmotivated or tired or flat, the other amps them up. Or we simply push through it in order to support the other. And we always feel better for it. We compare our results at the end of class and high five each other’s achievements. This carries over into our home workouts which are geared towards our mutual improvements in class. We even have a whiteboard running tally of our PBs in the different events so far. Doing a sport you love with your best friend and greatest ally is such an amazing feeling. It’s brought us closer together when I really didn’t think that was possible.

My lifting buddy is my best friend and my soulmate (swolemate??). I’m the luckiest girl in the world.