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Potsdam man going to national ‘strongman’ championships in Reno

Posted 9/21/14

By CRAIG FREILICH A Canton native qualified for the North American Strongman National Championships literally before he knew it. Only a year into this pursuit, Nathan Locke, now living in Potsdam, …

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Potsdam man going to national ‘strongman’ championships in Reno

Posted

By CRAIG FREILICH

A Canton native qualified for the North American Strongman National Championships literally before he knew it.

Only a year into this pursuit, Nathan Locke, now living in Potsdam, will be headed to Reno, Nev. in October for the national meet and a chance at competing in next year’s World’s Strongest Man contest.

A lot of people will go into a gym or health club with the goal of losing weight, tightening up, or maybe even working on the fabled “six-pack.”

But Locke says working up to a strongman competition is not like any of those challenges.

“It’s hard to train for it in a gym – it’s all out of the box. It’s not like a powerlifting meet, where you know exactly what you’re going to do – a deadlift or a press.” He says when you get to a strongman meet, you won’t know what combination of strength tests you will face, whether it’s flipping a huge tire, lifting a series of heavier and heavier “Atlas rocks” onto a platform, or towing a truck down a course for the best time, or maybe a new test you’ve never seen before.

“Every meet is different.” So to prepare, he will lift weights, and then “you just try picking up heavy stuff, the biggest heaviest stuff you can find.”

You might strap on a harness and pull a truck, or get some heavy kegs and lift and throw them, or try lifting some of those rocks, or press a log.

“You can’t really train for specific events. You have to be pretty strong at everything.”

Locke graduated from Canton’s Williams High School in 2006, went to SUNY Canton and got an auto technician certificate there before taking a job with New York State Corrections Department Security Services. He works for them now in Malone.

Locke said he became interested in the sport when he was transferred to work in Malone and some of his fellow corrections officers were training.

“You get tired of going into a gym and just lifting weights. This was something different. I’d seen it on TV.”

Inspired by some of his corrections colleagues, Locke entered a strongman contest in Malone last fall.

“It was a small meet, and I was the only one in my weight class, so of course I won.

“I’ve only been doing this seriously for a year, really. I wanted to learn, so then I went to the Watertown meet.”

He says he likes this kind of contest, where “everybody’s competing side by side, and everybody’s supporting each other. It’s not pitting one man against another. You’re really testing yourself.”

So he entered the Watertown contest in June as a heavyweight “and I ended up winning that, too.”

And he had heard about another tournament in Wallkill, the Hudson Valley Showdown, in August.

“Wallkill was in the back of my mind, so I decided to make the cut to middleweight,” with a 231-pound limit, before that meet.

“It was the right move. It made me pound-for-pound strong enough to win the thing.”

At Wallkill, “the conditions were right, they were the right events for me, and I ended up winning.”

What he didn’t know at the time was that the Wallkill meet was a qualifier for the big-time Reno event in October.

“It was during the awards ceremony. I didn’t even know at that point that I’d won the meet. I knew I did well – maybe second, I thought.

“I ended up winning there. I was just going down to see what I had to be for next year.”

He’d won, and it wasn’t until then that he learned that all first and second place finishers in each class got tickets for the nationals Oct. 4 and 5 at Circus Circus Reno.

The match in Reno is for heavyweight, light-heavyweight and middleweight men competitors and now also for light-heavyweight and middleweight women.

Locke is now 5 feet 11 inches and 245 pounds. Does he think he might be able to compete as a heavyweight in Reno?

“I would like to think so. But you can only get so big. I don’t know if the joints would work out that well. It would be a 30-pound jump to heavyweight, and I don’t know if that would necessarily be good.”

He notes that these weight classes do not include the “open-class” heavyweights, at the true top of the game, the men we see in the televised strongman meets.

But he is psyched for the October meet in Nevada. Not only is it a qualifying match for the 2015 World’s Strongest Man contest, but “it’s also a chance to go pro,” Locke said.

“I’ll go down with the same mindset for Reno. If I do well, that’s awesome, and if I don’t do well, it’s still awesome. And I’ll definitely keep at it.”

Locke says he’s grateful for the support he’s received from the corrections union NYSCOPBA, the Upstate Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), and Camp Cupcake Gym. “They’ve supported me all the way and even helped financially,” he said.