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The LEG PRESS
06/04/06
by Clay
According to Dan Kendra of Florida State when he leg-pressed 1,335 pounds and was asked by another student to explain his resulting bloodshot eyes he responded, “I met the devil.”
The man, the myth, the legend that is Dan Kendra.
Presumably in leg-pressing 2k pounds, Rev. Pat Robertson not only met the devil, but slew him. Unfortunately this slaying of the devil was neither confirmed nor denied by Robertson’s statement that he released to CBS Sportsline confirming that he did, in fact, leg press 2k pounds. This was evidently one of many uncertainties that readers had about my recent Pat Robertson leg press column and resulting pentathlon challenge.
Devil…prior to being slain by Pat Robertson.
Now that the entire free world is aware that Pat Robertson claims to leg press 2k pounds, I am firmly aware that the internet is like a big game of telephone. On Monday I said there was no way Pat Robertson could leg press 2k pounds and by Saturday I was getting emails asking whether it was true that Pat Robertson and I were lovers who were going to proclaim our affinity for one another on a nationally televised show while we painted famous scenes from the Bible on canvas and that former Florida State star Dan Kendra would be the judge of our paintings as soon as he finished catching Osama Bin Laden in the mountains of Pakistan. Surprisingly this was a tad inaccurate.
Life on the internet.
Also it brought home to me the fact that I need to clarify a few things:
First of all my awareness of Dan Kendra’s leg press ability derives from the peculiar fount of athletic knowledge that the deadlyhippos own 27 keeps for rapid recall. Dan Kendra’s initial leg press strength made an appearance when I attempted to leg press the same 400 pounds as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Since bragging about the leg press is the rough weight room equivalent of bragging about that neck workout machine that some guy from Estonia seems to be the only one ever using, I was unfamiliar with what strength most people possessed when it came to the leg press. (Deadly Hippos Lesson: In the Baltics one never knows when the ability to move 200 pounds with only the neck will be required.)
Don’t ever try to dunk this man in a pool. You will die.
So Dan Kendra’s feat came to represent a rough approximation of what a strong, athletic man was capable of leg pressing. When I attempted to leg press 400 pounds at the Vanderbilt Gym the looming question in my mind became: “Was I more like Dan Kendra or Madeleine Albright?” The answer for me was, sadly, Madeline Albright. And I wasn’t even as strong as Madeleine Albright.
Albright illustrates how much bigger her penis would be than Clay’s if she had
need for a penis.
So based on my own leg press failure, I was shocked to receive email word from a reader, Ken Pederson, that a 76 year-old man claimed to leg press 2k pounds. Put plainly, I reverted to Dan Kendra as my arbiter to decide that if the best leg-press that Division 1 athletes at Florida State could manage was 1,335 pounds it was unlikely that a 76 year old preacher from Virginia outshone them all. The resulting column brought forth hundreds of email responses (95% of which agreed with my original contention) and tens of thousands of you across the internet felt the same way. Ultimately dozens of professional trainers, weight-lifters and other assorted gym experts wrote in to dissect, discredit, and take issue with Robertson’s claim.
Second, Pat Robertson claims to have legitimately leg-pressed 2k pounds. Not British pounds as many of you suggested, not as part of several repetitions that added up to 2k (200 pounds ten times was the most prevalent although we also heard 100 twenty times and sundry other variations) and not by any other weight measurement. The leg press is not the squat or a calf-raise or any other type of leg workout. Also my contention that Pat Robertson leg-pressed 665 pounds more than the Florida State record set by Dan Kendra was based on simple math (I can do no other kind) 2000-1335=665.
Ultimately Robertson’s camp released video of him leg-pressing 1000 pounds ten times while the bar was still locked in place. While it may have been an impressive feat for a man of Robertson’s age, it was still at least a thousand pounds from his claimed leg press and tons of readers took issue with Robertson’s technique, his use of hands to push his legs up, and even the amount of weight actually shown in the video and the pictures.
The purported press. Nice product placement there for Adidas. And even better
product placement for all those people who workout in corduroy pants.
But the Pat Robertson leg press debate has taught me several things:
1. My readership seems to be made up almost entirely of the extremely intelligent and the extremely idiotic. There is no middle ground. With all my heart, I thank the intelligent for writing. Lots of you analyzed the Pat Robertson tape with such skill and diligence that had you been selected by the FBI to review the Zapruder tape, there would never have been any suggestion of a Kennedy assassination conspiracy. Seriously, your analysis was that impressive. One reader even utilized a mathematical formula that incorporated the sine and cosine to analyze the angle of Robertson’s machine in an effort to demonstrate the true amount of weight that he was leg pressing. This had me breaking out in the same pre-calculus sweats that I thought I had left behind forever in my junior year of high school. Other readers were completely unintelligible. In their defense they may have been writing in Sanskrit.
Clearly, Robertson went back and to the right, back and to the right.
2. Some of my readers think that by quoting random Bible verses they are going to change my life. It's even better when these Bible verses bear no connection whatsoever to the statement. Like, "When the wind blows in August the trees weep in October." Galatians 10:16. I felt as if I was getting inundated by emails from the Val Kilmer shaman in Entourage.
Season 3 starts on Sunday June 11. Watch it if you have a life.
3. Since this story erupted over Memorial Day weekend my favorite thought has been the Robertson “brain trust” huddling around a conference room table trying to figure out how to respond to the leg press media onslaught. Interestingly, despite Pat Robertson’s contention that God informed him that a tsunami was going to hit the Pacific Northwest, the good Reverend appeared to be unaware that a metaphorical media leg press tsunami was approaching his own life since, according to the resulting AP article about this imbroglio, Robertson was out of town for the weekend and unavailable for comment. I suppose this could be the definition of irony. But maybe not because after all as they taught me in Southern Baptist Sunday School, “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
Unfortunately there is not a leg press tsunami hazard zone sign.
4. To answer all of your inquiries about whether the Rev. and I will be engaging in competition, Pat Robertson’s people have not responded to my pentathlon challenge. This is extremely troubling to me. Even writing about the lack of response makes me sad especially because for a while there it looked like Pat and I were going to be on a first name basis. And I’ve been working hard on my brush strokes so that I could show Lot’s wife turning into salt so perfectly that a confused margarita drinker might try to scrape the canvas to make their drink tastier.
My salt would blow this salt pillar out of the water.
5. Somewhere current Navy Seal and former Florida State star Dan Kendra is wondering how in the world his name just got resuscitated on a sports website. Imagine if you had told Dan Kendra when he was ten that an athletic feat of his was going to sweep the country and that newspapers everywhere would write about him and that his name would be all over the internet. Young Dan would have been ecstatic. And then Kendra kept waiting throughout his football career at Florida State and then was still confident when he tried out for the NFL, and then out of nowhere in late May of 2006 his name was everywhere. This might also be ironic. At the very least, Dan Kendra should be happy to know that he remains the patron leg-press saint of my friend the 27.
Not only first in the heart of the 27, but also his cat Lorenzo.
6. Several readers wanted to know whether or not, after the video and photos, I now believe Pat Robertson can leg press 2k pounds, I thought I made it clear in my open letter to Robertson when I stated: “It has come to my attention that you are the Strongest Man in the World.” I stand by those words. After all when Pat Robertson chopped down a cherry tree he also told his mother, “I cannot tell a lie.”
What the tree looked like before Pat Robertson chopped it down.
7. A few people asked me if Pat Robertson is the new Chuck Norris. This is just silly. We already knew that Pat Robertson could divide by zero and that when Robertson did a push-up Pat didn’t actually push himself up, he pushed the earth down. Also we knew that there was no theory of evolution. Just a list of animals Pat Robertson allowed to live. Actually all of these Chuck Norris facts are applicable to Pat so maybe it’s not so ridiculous after all.
Truth to the rumor that Robertson will be Stallone’s foe in Rocky 6? Stay tuned.
8. To the few readers who questioned whether or not Pat Robertson’s claim had
altered my opinion of my own strength, I say: Not at all. I never had much to
prove after I bench-pressed Czechoslovakia. For the record it was my initial
bench press of Czechoslovakia in 1993 that tore asunder the original country
and created both the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Of course neither Pat Robertson
nor I is anywhere near the absolute beast that seventy-five year old Indian
guru Sri Chinmoy is. Thanks to readers Tripp Stewart and Doug Wetzel for notifying
me that in the year 2002 Mr. Chinmoy lifted 100 cows in an overhead platform
standing calf (pun intended?) raise as well as lifting 1000 lambs in a seated
double-armed overhead lift.
www.srichinmoyraces.org/sri_chinmoy/athletic_achievements/
Oh, and for good measure Mr. Chinmoy recently curled 203 pounds with one arm.
This is one of the best pictures I have ever seen. Is Chinmoy wearing tights
here?
I think it’s safe to say that if Mr. Chinmoy’s DNA was mixed with Mr. Robertson’s DNA the Incredible Hulk would be formed.
The result of Pat Robertson and Sri Chonmoy’s combined DNA.
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