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When Marunde was planning his workout for July 25, odds are that Callie had something on the stove or in the oven. His daily training table called for, among other things, 20 egg whites, a vat of oatmeal, a gallon of raw milk, family-sized servings of fresh-killed game like moose or pheasant or two or three pounds of grass-fed beef, a pound of wild salmon or halibut, cans of tuna, half a jar of peanut butter and … well, space just doesn't permit the list of vitamins, amino acids and other supplements.
When he typed "wish me luck," his daughter, J.J., was six weeks old. Jesse worried about holding her in his huge hands, calloused from lifting barbells. About holding her in arms made too rough by the rash and scabs left over from wrapping around the cement Atlas stones. "With the beard he had, he felt like there wasn't anything soft enough for her to touch, even his face," Callie says. "Finally he decided that his nose was the one thing she could touch."
When Jesse Marunde signed off the site that day, his son 9-year-old, Dawson, from a previous marriage, was probably off playing with friends in Sequim. Jesse had settled in Sequim to be close to Dawson. At first he struggled to make ends meet. Before he set off to be the world's strongest man, he was the strongest car valet in the Pacific Northwest. He chopped wood. He was a mover. When he started out in strongman, he slept in his truck at competitions. If Dawson needed something, Jesse was ready to do without. "Jesse didn't have an ego," Breck Gault says. "He put others in front of himself."
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The Sequim Crew -- as Travis, Sarge and Beck called themselves -- was all about Jesse. "You could be with us but you had to understand that it wasn't about you," Sarge says. "We were there for him and it was easy for us to accept; he was just so gifted. He was just so much stronger than us … I spent more time taking plates off a bar than lifting."
The Sequim Crew had plans. The plan called for Jesse to win WSM, to win it again just to prove that luck wasn't involved, and to move on from strongman. They were going to ride with Jesse. Jesse dreamed big and his dreams included them.
"We talked about climbing Everest without oxygen," Sarge Allen says. "We talked about eco-racing the length of South America." It all started with Jesse proposing to his wife in Africa at 23 and marrying her a year later in a crater in Hawaii. Jesse Marunde had a full inventory of memories, but the bigger stuff was still out there when he wrote up the plans for July 25 on the dry-erasable board. The last line: back squat drop set 230x8, 190x8, 150x8, 110x8, 70x10 The numbers are in kilograms. That's more than 550 pounds on the first set, decreasing by 90 pounds per rapid set. No rest. An endurance test. Then, not on the board, right after the last squat set: flipping a 900-pound tire. And then, right after that: loading a 265-pound Atlas stone onto a platform. That's the pretty intense moment, trying to find explosion in shaking legs.
The video camera was rolling, something for the Web site, something for posterity, something to look back on after a victory at the World's Strongest Man. Jesse made it through the squats, made it through the tire flip.
Then came the Atlas stone. Two-hundred sixty-five pounds: Fresh, he could have chest-passed the thing like a medicine ball. His best was 200 pounds more than that. This time he couldn't raise it onto the platform for all the Sequim Crew's shouting; maybe someone else would have walked away. Jesse Marunde didn't.
"I've got this," he said and he dipped and strained and made the lift, dropping it on the wooden platform that Breck had constructed.
High fives, fist bumps and "oh-yeahs."
Marunde was foggy. He dropped to the floor. Not unusual. That was where Jesse gathered himself after a tough lift. Sarge went to hand him a water bottle and noticed that Jesse was having trouble breathing. Within minutes an ambulance was on its way while Sarge administered CPR. An hour with a defibrillator and shots of adrenaline couldn't bring him back. Gone.
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The workout after the funeral was supposed to be a celebration. The other strongmen spread out around the gym and went through their workouts, like a team of dancing bears moving around the three rings of a small circus. But tears welled up in Sarge's eyes. He was second-guessing himself. He couldn't help it. He was going to be playing it over in his mind for weeks and months, even after an autopsy found that Jesse had an enlarged heart and a genetic condition that put him at risk. Sarge wouldn't let go.
"I've asked myself so many times, 'Did he push too hard? Did I push him too hard?'" Sarge says. There was no telling Sarge Allen that it had been Jesse pushing himself. Not Sarge pushing him, but Jesse going out and testing the limits of human strength on his own. Maybe Jesse Marunde realized when he set the Atlas stone down that he was in trouble, that he hadn't left enough for the return trip. Maybe the high fives and fist bumps he exchanged with the Sequim Crew weren't just a way of saying goodbye but also a way of saying that he was good with it.
Gare Joyce is a regular contributor to ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com. His new book is "Future Greats and Heartbreaks: A Year Undercover in the Secret World of NHL Scouts
ESPN Page 2 - Joyce: Jesse Marunde, 1979-2007