The World's Strongest Book (eBook)

Introduction

You know what I get asked all the time? ‘Can you lift me over your head for a picture, pretty please?’

Now I appreciate that sounds like a pretty odd request, but when you are known as one of the strongest men in the world, it’s to be expected. I usually say yes, too. I’m always very happy to meet the fans and the lift is a little bit of free exercise. Plus, the photos do look very cool. Every now and then though, I’ll get asked another question.

‘What does it take to be strong?’

How do I respond to that? My entire career has been dedicated to answering that question, and I’m still not sure that I’ve fully figured it out. That said, I’ve won multiple Strongman titles and I’ve broken world records, so I probably know more than the average person in your local gym.

This book is an opportunity for me to go some way towards answering that question, ‘What does it take to be strong?’ I reckon the best way to answer it is by taking you behind the scenes of my toughest challenge yet.

You’re about to go through ten rounds with me – ten lessons I’ve learned in my career and that I called upon in preparation for ‘The Heaviest Boxing Match in History’. That was the name given to the ring showdown between me and Thor Bjornsson, which took place in Dubai on 19 March 2022. I’m going to introduce you to my team, as well as a few of my mates who happen to be elite in their fields. So welcome to the training camp, buddy. Welcome to Team Beast.

I’ve competed in a lot of competitions in my life, but I think getting in the ring with someone when you’re both trying to take each other’s head off is a hell of an experience. I mean, I’ve been in a lot of fights in my life, but obviously you don’t set fights up, you know, fights in general life just happen.

Boxing’s almost a surreal experience. I found I was walking into an arena, like the gladiators must have done thousands of years ago, and at the end of the day you’re doing it to entertain people. And I suppose that’s kind of how I felt, like it was a night of entertainment for everyone. And it was one of the world’s historic spectacles, in my opinion. Two of the biggest men on the planet going head to head – World’s Strongest Man versus World’s Strongest Man. It was an experience I’ll never forget.

After the fight, my pal Ross Edgley sent me a message, a quote from Theodore Roosevelt:

This book is a diary of me daring greatly. It’s a record of my two-year odyssey to prepare to fight Thor. It details the highs and the lows, the good, the bad and the ugly. It’s raw, it’s unvarnished and it’s the truth. I’m really taking you behind the scenes and everything that you are about to read is 100 per cent me and 100 per cent authentic.

I’ll let you in on a little secret – I had done precisely zero boxing training before I signed on for this fight. You could say I had a mountain in front of me. In this book, I take you with me on my journey from total novice to a professional showdown in the ring. Along the way, I’ll tell you about my life growing up in Stoke, I’ll share with you what it takes to smash world records and I’ll let you in on how much blood, sweat and tears it took for me to win the World’s Strongest Man in 2017.

What does it take to be strong? Over the course of this book, you’re going to find out. But here’s a little spoiler for you. It ain’t just pulling weights in the gym, or hitting 12,000 calories a day, or staying hydrated. Sure, you have to do all that stuff. But to reach the top, there’s another kind of strength that you have to work on. That is strength of mind. And it can only be developed through time and experience. As I share my story with you, you’ll begin to understand how my mindset was formed and the role it has played in getting me to where I am today. Over the course of ten chapters, I talk about harnessing the power of the ‘fight or flight’ instinct, the role preparation plays in achieving your goals, and how to use setbacks and failures to power you to success. I also take you deep down to the dark place of pain and show you how to break the impulse to quit. I talk about how to deal with complacency, what separates the good from the greatest, and how to seize the opportunity for victory when it presents itself.

I am living, breathing, sweating, swearing proof that it is possible to achieve the impossible. One of my earliest memories, and this is no lie, is watching the World’s Strongest Man with my parents and brothers in the room. I said, loud as anything, ‘I’m going to be the World’s Strongest Man one day.’ What do you think happened? Of course, the whole room erupted in laughter. My older brothers both slapping me on the head saying, ‘Oh, shut up, Eddie. How’s a kid from Stoke-on-Trent going to become the World’s Strongest Man? Impossible. Impossible, Eddie.’

Impossible. That’s the worst thing you can say to me. That word gets my back right up. When I hear it, something wakes up inside me. I’ve always found a way forward no matter the obstacle in front of me. When I hear the ‘I’ word, it just makes me want to go out and prove people wrong. I don’t want to stick it to people in a nasty way, but I do want to show them that it is possible to achieve amazing things in life. It is possible to do things that everyone else says can’t be done.

Now, there’s a reason some people believe some things are impossible. It’s because they’ve butted up against the boundaries time and again. It requires something special in order to break through what other people see as limits and push beyond them. I should know. It takes dedication. It takes sacrifice. It takes commitment, consistency and self-belief. Those five qualities – dedication, sacrifice, commitment, consistency, belief – they’ve been the cornerstones to everything I’ve achieved.

And I wasn’t ‘supposed’ to achieve anything. I left school when I was fourteen. I was a truck mechanic till I was twenty-seven. Absolutely nothing wrong with leaving school at fourteen or being a truck mechanic. School wasn’t for me and I learned a lot of life skills fixing up trucks. All that being said, I always had a vision for something more for myself and for my family. I knew in my heart that I could achieve the things I dreamed of. However, any bookie in Stoke would have laughed me out of the shop if I had put a bet on that I would break the world record for a deadlift or win World’s Strongest Man.

I got into Strongman around 2007, ironically at the urging of my brothers, the same ones taking the mickey out of me when I was a five-year-old watching the competition on the box. I’d been knocking about the scene for about eight years and knew if I was to close the gap between myself and the freaks like Zydrunas Savickas, Brian Shaw and Hafthor Bjornsson, then I needed to go professional. It was 2015 when a combination of me backing myself and circumstance allowed me to finally do it. It was in turning professional that I felt I finally had an opportunity to land the prize I’d longed for since I was a kid – World’s Strongest Man. One thing I figured out very fast was that being a professional was not actually about being paid, although of course it’s always nice to earn money from something I love doing. You might at this point ask, ‘Eddie, if being paid is not the point of being a professional, then what is?’ For me, being professional is about what the money allowed me to do. In my case, it freed me to focus on achieving my goal of winning World’s Strongest Man. In turning professional it meant there were no excuses for failure any more. Whatever I did or didn’t do, it rested entirely and solely on my shoulders.

At the beginning of 2015, I was exhausted. I was working nearly a hundred hours plus a week in the day job as a mechanic. I was doing something like twenty to twenty-five hours a week running a door security company, making sure that the great and good of Stoke-on-Trent behaved themselves when they were having a night on the tiles. As well as that, I was putting in about twenty-five hours a week in the gym. I was eating everything in sight, every minute of the day, which was partly why I had to work all the hours that God gave me in order to cover my food bill. Not forgetting there was my family – I was trying to be a good husband to my wife Alex and a loving father to my children Layla and Max. AND I’m trying to back up my five-year-old Eddie’s bull – win World’s Strongest Man. There’s a lot of me to go around, but even I recognized at that point that there were too many...