Anything more than that, I think, and you’ll get discouraged and want to give up. That was fine, though, because my goals were always modest and incremental-do slightly better at this contest, improve my max in this lift by few pounds or my time in this event by a few seconds. “While I did begin participating in strongman competitions right away, that meant I finished last in eight consecutive events. “But it wasn’t like I was fantastic right off the bat,” he says. And while Kearney wasn’t built to blaze through Fran in record time, he did flash some innate talent for lifting heavy weights. Back in 2009, Kearney was just a beefy if somewhat undersized 17-year-old kid looking for something to do besides football - and a teacher at his high school tossed him a life preserver, inviting him to train at the local CrossFit gym.
I said, ‘Dude, I suck dick and I’m stronger than you.'įor Kearney, this level of self-assurance has come after a decade of consistent improvement in his chosen sport. “Look at my Instagram”-where Kearney goes by the handle worlds_strongest_gay, while husband Aleixo is worlds_gayest_strongman - “and that’s what you’ll see: me lifting heavy weights and hanging out with my husband.”Ī guy in the crowd was shouting dumb slurs.
“I’m here for two reasons: to succeed at the sport of strongman, and to show LGBT folks and everyone else that this sort of success isn’t just possible but normal and acceptable,” Kearney tells me. And the third is that Kearney, openly gay since 2014 and married to husband Joey Aleixo since March of this year, pulls no punches about matters of identity. The second is that Kearney’s strongman workouts are masterpieces of technique and conditioning, where he uses excellent pressing technique to heft training logs and dumbbells and blasts through sled and yoke runs. The first is that Kearney, at 5’10” and 285 pounds, is a surprisingly normal-sized competitor-relatively speaking-in a sport filled with giants like four-time World’s Strongest Man champion 6’8”, 440-pound Brian Shaw and 6’9”, 440-pound defending World’s Strongest Man winner and Game of Thrones actor Hafthor Björnsson. Three things immediately stand out about Rob Kearney, a 27-year-old rising star in the professional strongman world who looks to make a big impact in this year’s World’s Strongest Man competition that starts June 13 in Bradenton Florida.
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