Plague of Strength

I realize that a lot of you are eagerly awaiting the finale to the Bill West series, but like just about any goddamned thing about which I write, I’ve gone down a crazy ass rabbit hole involving competing gyms, Westside’s training, and working on more than one book at once. Because I have absolutely no ability to write a book while that series is hanging over my head like an executioner’s axe, that series is gonna be on hold for the next two weeks. In the meantime, I’ve got an interview I’ve done with competitive strongwoman and actress Cara Brennan. Over the course of this three parter we cover the strong is sexy movement and our intense hatred for it, training for noobs, the use of psychadelics for mental health (a subject about which I keep getting asked and with which have zero experience), weakness as a modern vice, and a whole bunch of other cool shit.

Q: It’s probably best if we introduce you to the Plague readers, as some of them might not be aware of the awesome that is Cara Brennan- I don’t recall how we were introduced, but I know your many fanboys bring you up incessantly in conversation.  You’re an up and coming amateur strongwoman, actress, personal trainer, psychonaut, strength coach, and all around awesome badass. You mind filling in the details there? And throw in your best lifts / pet lifts/ and whatever other lifting high points you want.

A: I first touched a barbell in mid 2014, and starting training for and competing in strongman in Feb 2015. I’ve competed 22 times. Prior to 2012, I was a mostly sedentary sad artsy person, kept semi-capable by my bar jobs. It kind of makes sense that strongman would ultimately be my sport of choice; my early “training,” was carrying boxes of liquor and pitchers of beer up and down stairs.  I love stoneloading and farmers walks; my best of the latter was 222 lbs per hand for about 35-40 ft (twice) in a failed record breaking attempt.

My favorite lifts I’ve ever done fall in the category of moments where I really gave over to total belief in myself and what I wanted to lift, and accessed what was essentially an altered state of consciousness and completely surprised myself. Notably, a 155 lbs per hand farmers handle hold for 2 min and 20 seconds where I literally recited Shakespeare (Richard III), said the Lord’s Prayer, and chanted a Buddhist mantra (in that order) to keep holding on. I won that event by about a minute. I also fucking love circus dumbbell (best was 110 lbs that I hit on my fourth or fifth attempt during a one minute AMRAP event. It was a 10 lb PR and I got it in the last 10 seconds, which almost never happens). I haven’t historically been great at any overhead, but the dumbbell is so beautiful, fun and graceful when done well; it’s helped me break through my overhead fear and I’m on my way to being respectable with it.

I find overhead to be the hardest and most impressive category of strongman lift in some regards (aka I just have to work harder at that than anything else to be barely decent), but stone loading has my heart (my best single is a 250 concrete atlas, my best volume a 190 lbs Stone of Steel for 10).  My static strength has lagged behind my moving and loading, so I’m really focusing on squatting and pressing a fuck ton right now, and just growing mass. My best barbell DL was pulling both 355 and 405 within about 30 seconds of each other in a ladder at Worlds Strongest Woman 2018. I’m not especially strong by my own strongman standards (yet), but I’m a very scrappy athlete and I hit some stupid PRs in contest just because of my attitude and willingness to go all in. That’s pretty much me as far as lifting goes.

I am a personal trainer/remote-coach by day, and indie filmmaker-writer-actor by night. Strong narrative story-telling is what I live for, and my long-term goals have to do with crossing my strength and film interests.

Q: Holy fucking shit. You’ve been lifting for less than five years and you’ve competed 22 times? That is absolutely bananas- that’s probably more than any person on a lifting subreddit has gotten laid in the same time period. You compete twice as often as most people get fucking oil changes, and started doing that right out of the gate. I don’t even think I’ve competed in kickball that many times.

That’s an impressive deadlift ladder- most powerlifters take such long rests between sets they’d get AIDS trying to do two heavy pulls inside a minute.  Workout density is a very often overlooked thing in the training world.

And Shakespeare?  You might be the first person in history to recite Shakespeare in the middle of a set.  You’re really taking the concept of Renaissance woman to the next level, eh?

Speaking of that, you’re the star of a web series called Asher, in which you hunt demons, which is dope as fuck just on its face, but you also train on the show.  The fact that no one mentions how hard they train in a movie or TVshow has always irked me- we either get endless training montages or nil- the critically panned (but personally beloved) Sabotage being the exception there.  How’d that show come to be? Was the training aspect something that drove you to make it in the first place?

A: Asher is the mutual brainchild of me and my best friend from acting school (who is also my roommate), Jack Payne; we co-write and produce, with him usually directing and/or acting as principal director of photography/camera operator. Over the years, Jack developed serious technical filmmaking skills (camera operating, editing, color correction, and so on), and when he moved in with me, I helped him out on some of his projects. We worked really well together, and had similar passions for saga style storytelling about heroes trying to be their best selves and save the day against terrifying odds, as well as superheroes and fantasy in general. We both wanted to write our own content;  auditioning for stuff seemed unbearable at the time for me, and we both has stories to tell. So we started writing, and Asher was what came out of our combined ideas.

Asher draws much of its thematic influence from stuff like Lord of the Rings, True Detective, Berserk, and Dune (the novel), and with a stylistic feel similar to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Evil Dead franchise. Asher is about a damaged but highly resilient/anti-fragile Army veteran turned exorcist grappling with her own trauma while she takes on ancient evils that no one else is fit to deal with. I don’t know many people who don’t have at least one serious trauma or psycho-spiritual weight to carry, and I think it’s valuable to show a character who isn’t just a nihilistic shit show who is fun to watch, like many antiheroes, but someone who is honestly trying to do the right thing, but struggles because of her own baggage and biases, like most of us do.

With regard to the training aspect, yes, this is a hugely important part of her character for many reasons (one of which is addressed in your next question). It is important to me to show a cause-effect relationship between physical and mental power because this was an integral part of my own training experience. Training made me mentally stronger, and getting stronger made me tougher. There’s compound interest in the pursuit of strength and toughness, you get exponentially able to deal with all kinds of different things. When people meet me now and say things like “oh, you’re so strong, it’s amazing, I could never do that!” I want to grab them by the neck, shove their face into a mirror and scream “you can! And the only reason you’re not is the person you’re looking at right now!” I was not born strong. I made myself this way. Anecdotally, seeing Sarah Connor doing pull ups left an indelible mark in my young brain when I saw T2 as a kid, and it was likely that desire to do a pull-up that was one of the original prompts for me to try to actually do something with my body. If I can have that effect on some kids out there who don’t think they can make anything of themselves, then it will well be worth it.

Asher being strong and training hard was also, naturally, a way for me to cross pollinate my interests and reach a wider audience. I would love to see muscular women represented as somewhat more mainstream and accessible (seeing as I’ve now made myself a niche actor just by being kinda swole), and I also know there are a lot of meatheads out there who are giant nerds (most of them?) in some aspect or another, so it just seemed like a no brainer. It wasn’t even a question of whether to include it, it was just a question of “how many slow mo gym training montages is too many?”

Q: Hahahaha.  Unless we end up back in 1987, I don’t think we’ll hit a saturation point on training montages- they were literally the best parts of shit like Rocky and No Retreat/No Surrender.  My friends and I used to rewatch those movies over and over and train while they played in the background. Hell, I have a buddy who still to this day trains to the Rock IV soundtrack.

It’s cool to see a badass chick character who actually looks the part.  Outside of Jessica Biel in Blade Trinity and Gina Carano in all of her movies, that never fucking happens.  The chicks are always waifs, and their fight scenes are utterly unbelievable as a result.  I’ll amend that and say Jennifer Garner is a believable badass in Peppermint, but I assume you feel the same way.  Does that annoy you as much as it does me?

A: Ohhh, yeah (side note, I don’t care if it’s objectively worse than I & II, I love Blade Trinity).

If a 5’2 110 lb woman gets roundhoused by a 250 lb 6’2 man and her head doesn’t fly off, I don’t buy it unless it’s already established that she has insane superpowers – and even then it irritates a bit, because it just makes sense that if you are magically / mutantly / genetically modified to be strong, you would still utilize the same basic system of expressing that quality, ie, have some fucking muscle. It enrages me, honestly.

We always planned for Asher to be physically violent, and David Cronenberg’s movies are a big influence from a stylistic perspective when it comes to violence, we want it to be as real and high stakes as possible. When Asher gets hurt, she is hurt for the rest of the episode/season. To justify the amount of damage she takes, she has to be built as hell and a clever fighter who uses her skills, speed and strength to her advantage, or it does not make sense and comes across as silly; she isn’t a Buffy. She does not have physical superpowers (and least not yet?), her powers are entirely spiritual-magickal. The idea that one’s willpower and ability to focus no matter what is happening is a big part of the character and why she is a good exorcist to begin with. Showing her training always seemed like a natural fit because it made sense for the character’s background, and from a storytelling perspective it justifies and shows part of why she is so tough. She’s tough because she TRAINS HER ASS OFF AND LIFTS ROCKS FOR FUN, it’s no accident.

The exclusion of buff chicks from mainstream Hollywood is symptomatic of their oddity amongst the general population, at least in part. One of my broad long term hopes is that we (America? Humanity?) all collectively get a lot physically and mentally stronger, and that that has ripple effects for generations to come. Hyper materialism and consumerism is killing us. We are overall, tragically weak and broken, and it depresses me on a daily basis (and it depresses everyone else too; unsurprisingly the correlation between overall health and mental health is pretty big – of COURSE that’s not the whole picture and being strong doesn’t make you immune to depression, but it can help A LOT).

I also believe this physical weakness reflects spiritual weakness; the fear of strength is a vice from a philosophical standpoint. You fear the strong because you are not strong mentally, emotionally, etc, and a jacked person is just a literal representation of that. You see it in other forms too of course (fear of appearing nerdy or “too smart,” etc). Something I say all the time is I wish I could impart psychically to people how liberating being strong and fast and athletic is if you can bust your ass to get to that point, and I have few regrets in life so far, and the main one is not starting sooner.

Q: “The fear of strength is a vice from a philosophical standpoint” is a really interesting statement.  I’ve written extensively about the devolution of humanity from a physical perspective (and it is time for one about the mental devolution of our species as well), though I’ve always looked at it as man simply getting lazy and soft because life has gotten so mechanized and easy.  Essentially, it’s a luxury. You’re taking that a step further and saying that indolence is a vice in which people indulge, just in the same way they might be gluttons or crack addicts. That is an amazing insight.

That, then, begs the question- what to do?  I mean, you could ally yourself with the Muscular Christianity movement, I suppose.  I’ll be writing an extensive series on that weird little movement, but that’s the only time in history of which I think fitness was necessarily a moral virtue… save for perhaps ancient Greece.  I seem to recall Socrates writing on the subject. What do you think needs to be done to combat a vice like this that seems to be destroying society at least as quickly as heroin?

A: “How do you combat a vice” is like one of THE philosophical questions, isn’t it? Why don’t you just ask me what the meaning of life is, hahaha. Okay, I’ll swing.

I think the answers lie somewhere in the realm of cultivating cultures based on meaningful work and vocations and asking the right questions to point us in that direction. From a purely health standpoint, the question is just “How do we get people strong and healthy”? But that doesn’t encompass the actual problems. We knows the basics, eat better, train harder, yadda yadda. It’s getting people to do those behaviors that is hard. So what are the behavioral problems caused by? Well some of the problems are socio-economic and cultural. So asking “How do we create cultures that promote behaviors that result in people being strong and healthy?” is probably closer to the right question. Crossfit is a great example, love it or hate it. Crossfit created a culture and an environment that has had massive ripple effects for a lot of people; I believe largely due to the fostering of tight-knit communities. Community is an insanely influential component of behavior change. Ironically, the example of heroin is appropriate because the opioid crisis is also likely born out of some of the same issues that are exacerbating our poor health, mental illness and general decline: a collapse of economic stability, community dissolution, and meaningful work/vocations (not to mention good old fashioned oppression). When people have nothing to live or hope for, what they do? Self-destruct. I think the solutions will likely arise out of creating communities where strength and health are a key component of the community.

When it comes to vices and virtues, I’d argue that virtue and vice are in part code for long term benefit behaviors(virtue) versus short term benefit behaviors(vice) and how a particular culture values those behaviors. Virtue can be the ability to act based on one’s future goals, and vice the inability to regulate oneself/behave more animalistically and give in to present desire. So if fear of strength is a vice, it is a vice in the sense that one is too afraid to change their status quo in service of something bigger (their own health/goals, etc). Simply being kinda strong isn’t hard for some people; and it certainly doesn’t make you a better person, but being afraid and unable to change yourself for the better is ultimately a short-term benefit behavior/vice.

Our current socio-economic climate is pretty terrifying and unstable for lots of reasons, and our monoculture is largely superficial. I think that people need SOME kind of spiritual or philosophical structure to help them make sense of the world, and to thrive in it: People need meaning. Meaning creates drive and resilience, and drive creates action; it can literally be anything that gives you purpose (family, rescuing cats, etc). Your basic instinct to survive gets you out of bed everyday, meaning gets to you exert phenomenal effort to achieve your goals. I think we are going through a serious spiritual crisis/renaissance that is reflective of people trying to figure out how to create meaning for themselves in a rapidly changing world (look the explosion of witchcraft, neo-paganism and Eastern-inspired spiritual practices, hell, even the zealotry of modern political “religions” in the wake of Christianity’s slow stumble into obsolescence). What the fuck does this have to do with getting in shape? Well, how one derives meaning is likely influenced by one’s social and physical environment.

Sometimes in less stable environments, risk-taking behavior decreases (there’s some emerging data on the effect of the 2008 Recession on the risk taking behavior of millennial for example; less big purchases, less moving cities, etc), and dramatic physical and behavioral change may be less likely as people struggle to hold on to what little stability they have – big physical changes may feel like a risk, even though it’s not.  A hard enough workout to disrupt your homeostasis is interpreted by your brain as a threat, and most people don’t have the natural masochism that drives elite lifters/athletes to tolerate/enjoy that threat, particularly if they are already afraid of their own shadow and under extreme chronic stress. Now that can DEFINITELY be developed, but it’s getting people in the habit of fitness in the first place that is the problem.

I think fear is one of the most potent motivators and de-motivators that people experience; but if you can create tangible meaning, that will override the fear. I also think that “laziness” is usually fear expressing itself through a mask. The lazy person might not actually be lazy, so much as totally devoid of meaning, self-loathing, disconnected from community, and utterly existentially hopeless. I have not yet met a lazy trainee. I have met trainees who can’t fully commit to the work it will take to meet their goals; but I believe that this is mostly a result of fear. A lot of people in my generation especially seemed to be paralyzed by fear of failure and fear of social rejection. The “fear of strength,” then, is maybe a little bit of our mammal brain realizing our mortality and fragility and being resentful of the awareness the comparison prompts, and maybe also a byproduct of not knowing what will happen if one changes their own behaviors.  I also don’t think the social element can ever be underestimated. We are tribal apes, and if your “tribe” discourages your fitness endeavors; your fear of group rejection will likely overpower your desire to change, UNLESS you have a strong enough (meaningful) goal to fuel you, particularly one that will positively reinforce an identity that you resonate with. Identity based behavior is another lens to consider; if someone stops being “the chill fun girl I can have a margarita and stay out late with,” does she lose her friends? Will that discourage her behavior change? These are powerful social forces.

Culture change takes, well, a lot. I like what Terence McKenna said about the “archaic revival,” in terms of looking to the ancient world to see how they dealt with similar problems. The Socrates quote, “it is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable,” is one I have always liked. Part of the Greek appreciation for training came from the understanding that training developed mind and body together, and maybe that’s where we have to move as a culture. The future is very uncertain, and we all need to be developing our bodies and our minds in order to meet it.

Sadly, a lot of people really don’t think they CAN change, and that’s one of the reasons I’m trying be vocal about my experiences. I changed some pretty terrible baseline habits to get to where I am now. All the individual strength devotee can do to spread physical culture is to find a way to incorporate their values into their physical practice. How do you convince someone to want to do what you like? Demonstrate that your physical practice is an integral part of your happiness/awesomeness AND that it is accessible. Be awesome, lift other people up, challenge them, but encourage them. How I treat my body now is an extension of how I treat my own soul and mind – I nurture it, but I also challenge it to be the best it can be. If I embody that all the time, then I become a positive literal expression of the things I say I believe in, and not just hot air.

Part two will be up shortly- like I said, I banked this interview so that I could use the time to work on 365 Days of Brutality, and frankly, a breath of fresh air was likely needed after my nonstop, rage-filled articles about the lifters of bygone eras and the myriad ways they were better than modern lifters.

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