The Eagle and the Dragon

by Chris Duffin

  The New York firm decided to auction off the company. With all the groundwork I had done to interest potential buyers, there were twelve bidders. I had spoken to eleven of them and agreed to terms for a management buyout. The twelfth won the auction. The day the organization’s new owners took possession, I handed in my notice and moved on. Over the years, I had earned the owners of various companies millions of dollars, in exchange for a good salary. While there was a time when that felt right for me, I had reached a point where I was no longer interested in simply having a job. I wanted an ownership stake in whatever I did next.

  I discussed the situation with the aerospace manufacturing company’s new owners, and they weren’t interested in offering me and the rest of the executive team a management buyout. They were a large, private, international company. They offered to keep me on in an excellent position, with lots of opportunity for career growth, and I turned them down. Nonetheless, their purchase of the firm was a win, because it left with me a sense of completion. I knew my work was done. I had taken the company from failure to success and, in the process, secured the future employment of everyone who worked there. I also spearheaded a shift in the environment from a place driven by stress and fear to one in which people felt good about their roles and knew they were doing the right thing. The employees were exceptionally grateful, and I still talk to some of them today.

  Some even work for me.

  My Career in Professional Lifting

  Throughout my time with the aerospace company, while my career was a huge focus, I also focused a lot on powerlifting. I knew that I could be more successful in either discipline if I was willing to drop the other, but I preferred to keep two strings to my bow. It was a subject that often arose in job interviews, as anyone who looks at me can tell that I lift. I always chose to be completely open about my love of strength, explaining that—barring a major tragedy—I would be out the door Mondays and Wednesdays by 4:30 p.m., and that I was not available to work Saturdays.

  A lot of my executive peers worked ten- or twelve-hour days, six days per week. I refused to do that, explaining that my results spoke for themselves. Occasionally it was an issue at first, but once people saw what I delivered, they accepted my position. My career may have suffered somewhat because I protected both my lifting and my relationships with my family, but it was worth it to me. As a result, my lifting took off. Many years ago, I realized the importance of a strong methodology. This applies to other areas of life as much as it applies to lifting. To succeed, you need the right equipment, the right methods, and the right people around you.

  For me, connecting with Rudy was a big piece of the puzzle. Nowadays, Rudy is my business partner. When we met, he was the only other person I knew who combined success in business with a dedicated lifting schedule. I was rotating through training partners at my home gym and became frustrated by the space restrictions. Shortly after we met, Rudy and I decided to open a gym. We leased a modest four-thousand-square-foot space and moved all my home gym equipment into it. I had so much stuff that it was enough to completely fill the new space. We named our new venture Elite Performance Center (EPC). Later, we renamed it Kabuki Strength, and it would become much more than just a gym.

  EPC became ground zero for some incredible feats of strength. From 2008, I was consistently ranked number one in the world at one discipline or another: the squat, deadlift, or full powerlifting. I set several all-time world records. For example, in the 220-pound weight class, I set a squat world record of 860 pounds, which I later bumped to 881 pounds. At that point, I was the heaviest person in history ever to squat four times his own body weight.

  As these feats became common knowledge, I became a celebrity in the lifting world. I showed up at events and people wanted autographs and pictures. For a kid who had spent most of his childhood living hand to mouth in the wilderness of California and Oregon, this was a strange experience. Although I received a bit of attention when the Bend Bulletin published my story, this was on another level.

  The Intense Consequences of Cutting Weight

  During my peak lifting years, I tended to push myself hard. Sometimes too hard. In 2015, I flew to Australia to take part in the World Championships. Following a twenty-hour flight, I was preparing to cut weight so that I could compete in the 220-pound weight class. This was a process I had undertaken many times previously, but each subsequent time I had allowed my weight to increase more and more before commencing the cut. I found myself cutting twenty pounds in a day, then twenty-two, then twenty-five. When I arrived in Australia, I was thirty-nine pounds overweight. I had approximately twenty-four hours to cut thirty-nine pounds, then another twenty-four hours following the weigh-in to bring my weight back up as high as possible. Cutting over 15 percent of my body weight in twenty-four hours was an extreme task by anyone’s standards.

  To put this into perspective, a typical weight cut for competitive purposes is between six and twelve pounds. Elite lifters sometimes drop as much as fifteen or twenty pounds in a day. At this level, it’s vital to have a high degree of knowledge in the science of weight manipulation. Cutting such a large amount of weight in such a short time alters the body’s electrolyte balance, which can lead to instantaneous death through heart or kidney failure.

  Over the course of my lifting career, I found myself driven to cut more and more weight. When I began, cutting in the region of fifteen to twenty pounds was a process I enjoyed. It stripped away the trappings of my normal life and took me into a zone of pure focus. Most of the athletes I competed against were full-time, elite lifters. Lifting was their job, perhaps in conjunction with owning a gym or working as a brand ambassador. My priorities were different, I was working full time as an executive and had hard rules about protecting my family life.

  With so much on my mind, cutting weight initially felt like a spiritual experience. In everyday circumstances, my job never left me. I was always thinking about some problem I was looking to solve or a meeting I needed to schedule. During and after a weight cut, there was none of that noise. While in the midst of the weight cut process, I experienced powerful epiphanies about my priorities or my future. Afterward, I was 100 percent focused on the upcoming competition. By the time I cut thirty-nine pounds for the meet in Australia, however, I was definitely pushing myself too hard.

  At the elite level, the competitive lifting community is small. I already knew many of the people who were there, either in person or via online interactions. I hung out with several other lifters who were known as big weight cutters and we hit the sauna together. Long flights cause water retention, so cutting weight was especially challenging. One by one, the other lifters left the sauna, until I was the only person still in there cutting weight.

  Well, not quite the only person. In an illustration of how tightly knit the lifting community can be, a friend of mine stayed with me. Sam Byrd was the squat world record holder in the 220-pound weight class, at 854 pounds, until I surpassed him with 860. He had recently taken a couple of years off competing until he decided to return and take part in the World Championships in Australia. He knew he couldn’t beat me, so he was cutting weight to compete at 198 pounds, a weight class below me.

  Around midnight, however, Sam realized that he wasn’t going to make weight. He got down around 210 pounds, but his body refused to drop any more weight. Instead of quitting, however, Sam stayed with me in the sauna, helping me and encouraging me. If I had failed to make weight for the 220-pound class, that would have been to his advantage. He could have beaten anyone else in that division. Simultaneously, spending time in the sauna when he no longer had any hope of dropping below 198 pounds put unnecessary strain on his body, hurting his performance and further reducing the chances of beating me. Yet he did it anyway. In addition to Sam, Andrei Miclea, a friend of mine who flew down to film the meet, was also with us.

  Around 2 a.m., the process of cutting weight became excruciatingly difficult. Sam was t
aking a nap break and I was on my own, with Andrei checking every few minutes to make sure I was okay. I knew I still had five more hours of sauna time before I dipped below 220 pounds, and those five hours seemed like an eternity. I had my sauna suit on, and it was time for my next shift, but I couldn’t bring myself to move. My face was white, and I burst into tears. Andrei looked at me and asked what was wrong. I explained that I was terrified of stepping foot in the sauna again, knowing that I had another five hours of extreme heat ahead of me. I was so terrified of the heat and the pain that I began to weep.

  Me during my intense weight cut in Australia, as I struggled to shed 15 percent of my body weight in twenty-four hours.

  At this level of intensity, cutting weight is an intensely dangerous practice. After each session in the sauna, I walked around the pool with Sam to maintain my body temperature and prevent myself from going into shock. I kept a nurse or a nurse’s assistant on hand during sauna sessions, a phone call away, in case I needed help from a medical professional. I even inserted IV catheters into my arms. I learned to do this myself as an insurance policy. During weight cutting the body becomes very dehydrated, resulting in decreased systemic blood flow. If I collapsed and my veins had shrunk too far, it could have been difficult for my nurse to insert an IV and rehydrate me with fluids. Had I arrived with IVs pre-fitted, however, the process would have been much simpler and faster. Scary as this sounds, it’s simply good preparation when undertaking such an extreme activity.

  I kept pushing through and at about 6 a.m., I knew I was close to my goal. At this point, however, I lost my hearing. I was already slurring my speech, and suddenly I was also unable to hear. Over the next couple of hours, it returned weakly, although I was still struggling to hear properly. Weigh-ins were due to take place at 9 a.m., approximately forty-five minutes’ drive from the sauna. At 7:30 a.m., my team told me I was half a pound overweight and I only needed one more session. Through the fog of my impaired mind, I knew they were mistaken. I needed at least two more twenty-minute sessions to drop the final half-pound.

  I looked at them, defeated, and said I’d give it ten more minutes. I knew it wouldn’t be enough, but I had given up. I was going to come in overweight and, at that point, I no longer cared. As I sat in the sauna, however, a change came over me. “No,” I thought. “I’m not giving up. I’m Chris Duffin. I can do anything. I’ve got this.” I sat in the sauna for about thirty-five minutes, without a break. My teammates were looking at me through the window, knocking on the door, and checking whether I wanted to come out. I kept signaling that I wanted them to stay outside, because if they opened the door, heat would escape. When I felt I had done enough, I signaled to them to come and get me. They entered the sauna, picked me up, and carried me to the car. I couldn’t walk or talk. They drove me to weigh-ins, where I was just able to stand long enough to step on the scales. I successfully made weight. The day of a powerlifting competition, I should have been the strongest I had ever been, but only twenty-four hours prior, I was weaker than I had been for years.

  With the long flight and the intense weight cut, I had been awake for almost three days. All I wanted to do was sleep. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option. I needed to eat constantly to recover my strength, take in IV fluids, and do some light gym work to increase blood flow and shuttle the carbohydrates and liquids I was taking in to my muscles. By the time I went to bed at around 11 p.m. that night, I had regained the entire thirty-nine pounds. The next morning, I woke up and competed.

  Perhaps due to the fact that Australia is a long flight from almost everywhere else in the world, causing competitors to retain a little more water than usual, I was the only lifter to successfully pull off a major weight cut for the meet in Australia. As a brief primer, in competitive powerlifting each participant has three attempts at each discipline: squat, deadlift, and bench press. Successful completion of a specific weight enables a competitor to move on to a higher weight, with final weights added up to reach a final total. Anyone who fails three times at any discipline without registering a successful lift is disqualified from the competition. I won my class, squatting 840 pounds and registering a 2,060-pound total. In fact, I squatted more than anyone in the 242-pound weight class. The only person in the competition who squatted more was the world record holder in the 275-pound class.

  While I succeeded in cutting weight for the competition in Australia, I believe I came within half an hour of death. I took a lot of precautions, I monitored my electrolyte levels, and I knew exactly what I was doing. I believe it was only my total dedication to the process that kept me alive. For this reason, I rarely talk or write about cutting weight, and I refuse to publish the details of my methods. I don’t want anyone attempting to emulate me.

  Dropping twenty pounds can prove fatal. Anything beyond twenty pounds is incredibly dangerous. I cut thirty-nine pounds. Looking back, I think I only achieved that because I was extraordinarily driven, because I had been lifting for a long time, and because I increased the amount I was cutting in small increments per meet. Even so, I don’t think it is a good strategy. I succeeded despite my extreme weight cutting, not because of it. I wish I hadn’t done it and I think I could have been substantially more competitive if I’d chosen a different path.

  To give you an example of the severe impact cutting so much weight has, here’s a story from a local competition. My business partner, Rudy, and I shared an office at the gym we had opened together. The night before weigh-ins, I left work, cut more than thirty-five pounds to make weight, and walked back into the office the following morning. I stood next to Rudy in the office; he told me that weigh-ins didn’t start for half an hour and asked why I was in his office. The weight cut had caused my face to look so ghostly and depleted that he didn’t recognize me and thought I was one of the lifters waiting to weigh in. This is a business partner and friend who saw me almost every day. I had to tell him, “Rudy, it’s me.”

  My ghostly face after an intense overnight weight cut. When I stepped into my office, my business partner didn’t recognize me.

  In addition to cutting weight almost to the point of death, my tendency to push myself beyond my own limits led to several injuries. I ripped the sternal and clavicular heads of my left pectoral muscle off the bone where they attach to the arm. They were surgically reattached. While squatting a heavy weight at a meet, I tore my groin, partially detaching it from the bone. I can still hear the sound it made; like a slightly wet newspaper being torn to pieces, except that it was the belly of my muscle ripping apart. I recovered from the physical injury in three to four months. The mental scars took a year and a half to heal. Every time I went down into a squat, I half-expected to hear the same sound.

  The catalog of injuries goes on. I detached one of the heads of my right bicep from the bone, and it has never been reattached. During the course of writing this book, I detached one of my right hamstring muscles (there are three) while attempting to deadlift 880 pounds. One of our core pillars at Kabuki Strength is charity, and I was trying to raise money for a children’s cancer research organization. By performing the feat for thirty days in a row. I made it seventeen days. I’ve had surgery on both of my elbows and have a very limited range of motion in those joints.

  Although I don’t feel a lot of pain due to the nervous system disorder that allowed me to stay calm when I broke my arm as a child, my lifting and daily life are impacted by the injuries in my elbows. One of the reasons I hate talking on the phone is because it’s practically impossible for me to hold a phone up to my ear, so I need to rely on the speakerphone. Sometimes, due to the way I need to position my body to accomplish these tasks, people think my mannerisms when I eat or drink are odd.

  Cutting out Everything Nonessential

  My entire life, I’ve been all-in. Whatever I commit to, I give it everything I’ve got. If a friend asked me for a weekend hunting trip, I would buy a whole new tranche of equipment and research the local fl
ora and fauna. Lisa helped me understand this aspect of my personality. She showed me that, although I’m talented and I can achieve what I set my mind to, I need to make decisions about exactly what I set my mind to. With a little more discernment, I can accomplish a lot more than I can by tackling every scenario that comes my way.

  As a result of this realization, I narrowed my focus enormously during the period covered by this chapter. Anything that fell outside of work, lifting, family, and vehicle fabrication was cut. For example, I hired a groundskeeper to mow my lawn and a cleaner to clean the house. Actions like this helped me to conserve bandwidth for my true priorities.

  Despite this shift, I was still pushing myself incredibly hard. My job was a high-risk position, with the possibility that I could lose everything at any moment if a superior decided I wasn’t meeting expectations. My lifting was incredibly intense. Although I have accomplished some incredible feats of strength, I think I could have performed a lot better if I had taken a step back and stopped pushing myself to the limit in multiple disciplines at the same time. Lisa challenged me repeatedly, telling me that it was challenging for her and—later—our kids to watch me drive myself so hard. As the injuries mounted, I began to feel that she was right. It was time to dial back the intensity and reduce the risk of damaging myself.

  The time had come to retire from competitive lifting. I picked a meet nine months ahead and set myself one final goal: to total 2,200 pounds in the 220-pound weight class, making me the lightest person ever to lift ten times their body weight. This had been a goal of mine for a number of years, but I had never quite achieved it. While I had the strength, cutting weight hampered my performance.

  Additionally, rapid weight manipulation sometimes caused my hands to swell—a well-known phenomenon in the powerlifting world—which made it much harder to hold a bar. The process of cutting weight and the goal of realizing maximum strength in competition are directly at odds with each other—cutting weight made me weaker just as competition required me to bring forth my strongest self. As is often the case in life, the pursuit of performance is a matter of balancing extremes. I wanted to give it one more shot and then I would retire, whatever the outcome.