Hafþór Björnsson built himself up to become the World’s Strongest Man—and a nerd-world icon on GameOfThrones—but with the highs came onerous lows, and now he’s rethinking what strong even means. From SI’s Strength Issue:
Hafþór Björnsson built himself up to become the World’s Strongest Man—and a nerd-world icon—but with the highs came onerous lows, and now he’s rethinking what strong even means.Strength comes in many forms and has many sources. But what does it mean to be strong? We have a few ideas.The Mountain is a bluff. Biceps that were once cartoonish, the circumference of another man’s waist, are now merely . . . large.
Growing up outside of Reykjavík, he braced for being tall, if not strong. Thor’s father, Björn—hence the surname Björnsson, per Icelandic naming tradition—today stands around 6' 8". Thor played basketball, and as he grew he got better. By the time he was a teenager he was 6' 9", shaped like the ice floes drifting in the harbor.
To keep adding mass, his relationship with food became another contest. He didn’t merely eat. He destroyed plates. His daily meal count: eight. His daily calorie intake: 10,000. He would eat to the point of feeling nauseated, and sometimes beyond. Especially in Iceland—a country where, fish and licorice notwithstanding, most foods need importing—his grocery bill traced the same arc as his girth. But a weightlifter working security gigs at banks doesn’t have $5,000 a month to spend on his diet. “I was borrowing from everybody just to eat,” he says. Clothing made for another expense. Eventually he found a tailor across the Atlantic, in the Twin Cities, who specialized in habiliment for men who weighed as much as a piano.
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