Jesse tribute on espn.com
Sarge Allen and Breck Gault moved around the gym wordlessly loading plates onto bars. At Marunde Muscle and Fitness, the place where serious strongmen gathered in the town of Sequim on the Washington peninsula, there was no music. It wouldn't have seemed right just a couple of hours after the funeral. There was only the clanging of plates. Any other day Allen and Gault would have shouted to be heard above Anthrax and Metallica. Allen, the ex-marine from Texas, would have been barking out the count on reps, scaring anybody catching his boot-camp act for the first time. Gault would have been cheerleading, as hardcore as Allen. They had trained here four, five, six days a week for seven years. They had done it all for Jesse Marunde. Now Marunde was gone.
They always had said there was only one good excuse for missing a workout: a death in the family. They had the excuse; but training was their way of showing respect. The 20 other strongmen in Sequim for the funeral understood. They went to Marunde Muscle and Fitness with Allen and Gault after the service.
Allen and Gault have always lived for feats of strength and endurance. Gault, a contractor, can frame a house as fast as three good workers. Allen, in same line of work, pushes even harder. In the gym, Gault's grip strength is prodigious. Allen, in his 40s, once did 98 squat reps with his body weight, 218 pounds. "One of the five hardest things I've ever done," Sarge told people, leaving it to their imagination about what's really tough. But that was before this somber workout. It was taking all that strength to hold back tears.
In the gym a few days before, Breck had called for an ambulance and Sarge had kneeled across their best friend, driving his hands into Jesse Marunde's chest, trying to make his heart beat, trying to bringing him back to life.
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Back in 2004, Jesse Marunde and his wife Callie launched a Web site, marunde-muscle.com, to promote their gym. The Marundes posted photos: Jesse rolling over a car, Callie oiled and flexing on stage at body-building shows. They posted videos of Jesse in competition and training. It allowed Jesse to stay in touch with friends he made at the World's Strongest Man competition and other strongman events. It wasn't just a scrapbook. Jesse used the site to get into the heads of rivals with passive-aggressive trash talk. Like the message he sent to Travis Ortmayer, the self-styled "Texas Stone Man": After loading a 464-pound Atlas stone three times from the floor onto a 56-inch platform, Jesse looked at the camera and rated the lifts as "another day at the office" and mock-lamented, "Too bad Travis won't come up here and train with me."
Strongmen traded stories on the site's chatroom, which featured Jesse's training journal. On the morning of July 25, 2007, he posted this entry:
07-25-2007 ... Posts: 2,998
today's workout, I'm getting nervious ...
Last week I promised I would post some videos from this weeks training. I'm going to try to hit a high volume workout today that will be pretty intense.
here's what I'm going to attempt-
rev hyper 3x10
incline situp 3x10
barbell warmup 2x
power snatch 120x3x3, 130x3x3, 120x2x5
hang power clean 160x3x3, 150x5, 140x10
power clean and push press 150x3x5
DB lateral raise 45x3x12
DB military press 100x3x10
back squat drop set 230x8, 190x8, 150x8, 110x8, 70x10
leg extension 2x50
wish me luck--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last words. I'm getting nervious ... So nervous that his spelling went all to hell. Those who knew him couldn't imagine that he was ever really scared. Maybe other strongmen went to the gym to compensate for deep-seated insecurity, but not Jesse. He was always a prodigy of strength and courage. Growing up in Alaska, he didn't wait until his 10th birthday to start working with his grandfather, pulling in nets on commercial fishing boats on the Bering Sea. When he was 16, one fishing boat was drifting off in a strong current and, risking his life, he was the one who took a rope out to it in a dinghy and somehow made his way back to his grandfather's boat.
Jesse made it sound like he had less to fear in the gym than anywhere else. "I'm familiar with injury, illness, aches and pains," he said in an interview. "Some people call these ailments symptoms of over-training. I maintain injuries can be avoided for the most part by training smart, illnesses can be avoided by eating clean, [and] aches and pains can be minimized by being in a constant state of rehab and by executing proper technique on every lift." & pretty intense ... In another interview, he didn't pussy-foot around: "I rely on the power of me. Nobody will want it more than I do." Maybe somebody wanted it as much as Jesse did, but nobody had made it as an elite strongman faster. In his teens he was a promising Olympic lifter and won a football scholarship as a tight end to Montana State. But at 21 he devoted himself to strength training. A year later, Marunde qualified for the 2002 World's Strongest Man, the youngest finalist in the history of the event. "When I saw Jesse in 2002, I saw the future of our sport," said veteran strongman Hugo Girard of Canada. "He had an athleticism that we hadn't seen in strongman. He could move so well. He was so explosive."
In 2005, at age 25, Jesse finished second to Mariusz Pudzianowski of Poland when the World's Strongest Man competition was staged in China. The 2006 season was a write-off because of injury but Jesse had to rank as a favorite to win the WSM in Anaheim in September of 2007. "He had never been in better shape," Sarge Allen says. "Healthy and in great form."
wish me luck
Everything -- every workout, every meal, every competition -- was planned, but there was no taking luck out of the equation. "Jesse was out at the cutting edge of strength," Sarge Allen says. "Jesse was out there testing the limits of human strength, like the pilots trying to break the sound barrier in 'The Right Stuff.' It was dangerous and Jesse knew that. There are risks in other sports when you're on the cutting edge, but maybe not where you're risking your life. That's the difference with strongman." Marunde knew that Jon Pall Sigmarsson, the four-time WSM champion from Iceland, had died at 32 during a deadlift workout in the gym. And that Johnny Perry, a 29-year-old American had died of a heart attack just weeks after competing at the 2002 WSM. Like the test pilots in "The Right Stuff," strongmen pursue breakthroughs, records, transcendent moments. The danger isn't the going for it. The danger is in going too far.
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