C.R. gym owner wins national strongman competition

CEDAR RAPIDS – Ken McClelland looked around the Nevada Convention Center in Las Vegas last month and wondered if perhaps he was out of his league.

Sure, the 40-year-old owner of The Anvil gym in Cedar Rapids had some success in his four-plus years of competing in the sport of strongman. This, however, was the North American Strongman Master's national championships, where McClelland was pitted against more-seasoned veterans.

'I was relatively unknown,” McClelland said. 'It was my first year competing Master's. I was just kind of sitting off to the side and they were all taking bets on who was going to win each event and what numbers they were going to put up.”

If he was unknown then, he isn't now. The 6-foot-4, 340-pound McClelland won four of five events and claimed first place in the 40-and-over heavyweight division.

'Just was on a roll,” McClelland said. 'I had some momentum. I think I was just able to carry through with adrenaline and I pulled it off.”

Strongman is a sport where participants perform feats of strength – namely, picking up large objects and moving them. McClelland had qualified for NAS Master's before, but injuries or ailments that come with the sport always prevented his participation.

Feeling strong enough this time, McClelland opened with a second-place finish to defending champion Mike Kromer with seven repetitions in the log clean and press – where participants lift a 275-pound log to their chest and over their head as many times as they can in a minute.

The final four events were a clean sweep.

McClelland carried an 800-pound yoke on his back a distance of 60 feet in 9.19 seconds. Next, he bear-hugged a 300-pound sandbag and walked 212 feet, six inches. In the fourth event, McClelland lifted a 700-pound frame – set up like two suitcases – 13 times in a minute. He closed the competition by hoisting one 145-pound dumbbell to his shoulder and over his head 13 times in a minute.

'Strongman is one of the funnest sports because you don't always know what you're going to get when you show up,” McClelland said. 'You just show up and hope you're in condition and ready and strong enough.”

The Iowa-born McClelland was a state champion heavyweight wrestler and all-state cheerleader in Tempe, Ariz., before being recruited to play football at the University of Arizona by pro football hall of famer Tedy Bruschi. After college, McClelland decided to return to Iowa permanently.

McClelland operated a gym out of his garage on 4th street in southwest Cedar Rapids before the 2008 flood forced him to rebuild both his home and the gym. Eventually, the city of Cedar Rapids balked at his in-home fitness center, and two moves and a bevy of new clients later, McClelland operates a 6,000 square foot facility at 225 K Avenue Northwest.

'We have a wide range of clients,” McClelland said. 'Everybody sees the videos on Facebook of us deadlifting cars and all ripped up on stage. That's not all we do.”

In addition to youth wrestlers, swimmers, soccer moms and retirees looking to stay healthy, McClelland's past client list has included former Linn-Mar football player and current Indianapolis Colt David Parry. McClelland has worked with area Ultimate Fighting Championship mixed martial artists Erik Koch and Jesse Lennox, and even tried his hand at MMA for a couple of years nearly a decade ago.

McClelland plans on taking a brief break before entering in a United States Strongman qualifier in the next three months, where he hopes to qualify for that organization's strongman national championships in June of 2016. There he would have the opportunity to earn a Strongman Master's pro card and compete in qualifiers for the high-profile Master's World's Strongest Man in Europe.

'Part of it is the challenge,” McClelland said. 'You don't get into strongman unless you have a little bit of a screw loose. I'll walk around and see a big rock, like the rocks in people's yards that have names on it, and I always think to myself, ‘I wonder if I can pick that up.'”

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