Chris Spegal, standing 6-foot-7 and at 400 pounds, eyes his chance to lift for a powerlifting record he nearly owned a few months ago.
He’s a mountain of a man. A mountain gripped by a black nylon singlet, methodically pacing back and forth. He’s mentally in charging mode, soaking in as much raw adrenaline as he can before the monumental lift.
His pump-up song, a personal favorite by Five Finger Death Punch, blares in the background as he hovers above the weights.
It’s time.
Those gathered ready their phones to capture the moment and wonder how he will find a way to stand straight up. The metal bar bends unnaturally but does not break, and like a robotic crane, his body slowly returns to its vertical position.
His roar permeates through the room with a heavy dose of personal accomplishment. And it was then etched in history, or so he thought.
Chris Spegal, a 27-year-old alumnus of Ohio University is one of the top power lifters in the U.S.
And although he completed a raw deadlift – meaning without additional lifting assistance gear — of 915 pounds to break the North American record this past November, his lift wasn’t recognized by powerliftingwatch.com.
The claim against Spegal was that his Under Armour compression shorts under his singlet provided unfair support to the lifter.
“I was upset, because that’s something that has taken the life of me. It’s something I deserve,” Spegal said. “I know I didn’t do anything wrong. I know I can beat it.”
Spegal has come a long way to be at the extraordinary physical level he is now (standing at 6-foot-7 and weighs 400 pounds).
As a freshman football player at Ohio, he was an inch shorter and weighed 294 pounds.
And while performing a routine hang clean during his 2007-08 first season, his knee buckled awkwardly mid-lift. The result was a torn ACL, partial MCL, two meniscus tears and crushed cartilage off the femur.
Although it ended his athletic career, the university honored Spegal’s scholarship on the condition that he worked in the athletic department. A year later, he vowed to make lifting his hobby and to visit Ping Recreation Center five to six times a week.
He started by solely working his upper body, but then after another year he eased into making leg workouts part of his routine.
Then as a junior in college, he came across the deadlift.
He never had experience with it in any football lifting program; so due to his limited knowledge of the process and his knee recovery, his technique wasn’t ideal.
But over time, Spegal was a natural.
His training now takes place at Westside Barbell where he goes through an extensive training regimen full of dynamic lifts with his training associate, Louie Simmons.
Listing the activities of one deadlift-specific training day is enough to make you exhausted.
It consists of speed squatting, speed pulls, upper back work (shrugs, lat pull downs, rows), squatting with 2,000 pounds strapped to his waist while he deadlifts, reverse hypers (60,000 pounds worth) and then lots of abdominal work.
With all the exercises, it seems like Spegal would need to be mentally hyped and excited for each one, but Simmons says otherwise.
“If you use a high shot of adrenaline in your workout, it actually takes 16 weeks to replenish,” he said. “We can’t afford to do that in the gym, so we only do it in the contest when it counts.”
Along with his training, Spegal works as a manufacturing engineer at Kenworth Trucking Company in Chillicothe, Ohio.
Simmons said Spegal’s engineering mentality — he completed graduate school at Ohio in May 2014 studying Industrial and Systems Engineering — helps him think through his workouts.
Aside from his intelligence, his motivation to get in the gym nearly every day also allows him to reach his goals.
After Spegal released the news on Facebook that his record wouldn’t be recognized, he received positive comments from friends and others who followed his lift.
But there are plenty of competitors and record keepers who will continue to be extremely critical of his performance.
“(Power lifting) is not the type of sport where everybody is there to bring each other up and cheer each other on,” Spegal said. “It’s almost like a catfight, like people want you to fail.”
But that won’t keep Spegal from trying again.
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He plans to give his lift another go in 2-3 months, and he and Simmons are confident he’ll have no problem breaking the raw North American record once more.
“There are a ton of haters out there,” Simmons said. “It doesn’t matter. He’ll break it soon.”
nk596613@ohio.edu
@NKairys
