Quick take: My first trip to the Arnold Sports Festival, as one long supervlog. It covers Amateur Strongman Nationals and the Pro Strongwoman World Championships, and touches on the Arnold Disabled Strongman show, where I ended up helping with media coverage. Despite the clickbait title, the weekend wasn't a disaster: the only real problem was too many great shows happening at once.
My First Arnold
I went to the Arnold in 2018 mainly to watch strongman. I had a couple of days off work, and I wasn't sure what to expect, except that every single person there was in better shape than me. I planned to post daily vlogs, but that didn't work out, so this is the whole weekend in one giant video, about twice as long as anything I'd normally make. I'm also not used to filming myself, so bear with me.
Day One: Amateur Nationals
Before the men's heats started, the athletes all took a picture together, and the sidelines were full of friends and family excited to watch. The last amateur event of the day was the fat-back farmers: four reps on the deadlift, a farmers walk, then four more reps. Of course I had my favorites. I also caught up with a pro strongman in the audience, who talked about winning his pro card and moving up to heavyweight sooner than he expected, and with friends I'd met at a seminar almost three years earlier.
The Pro Strongwoman Show
This was only the second year for the pro women's show. The pro women are finally getting the recognition they deserve, with a show of their own, an opening ceremony with every athlete carrying her country's flag, and a noticeably more streamlined production than the year before. Events included the Fingal Fingers and the Hercules hold, and the day wrapped up with a stone medley on the Rogue stage that took things to another level. The final runs came down to seconds.
Day Two: Too Many Shows at Once
Here's the "disaster." The Arnold Amateurs, the Pro Strongwoman show and the Pro Strongman show were all running at the same time. If you make me choose, I'll choose my friends, since the pro men's show was online within a few hours anyway.
Then I found out the Arnold Disabled Strongman show, only in its second year, had cameras but no media people. A kind athlete I knew from Maryland was competing, so I grabbed my camera and gimbal and helped them get coverage. Athletes came from all over the world, and special wheelchairs were brought in from Iceland so seated athletes could compete in the Atlas stones and the press medley. That's something you either capture in the moment or not at all, so it was an easy call. Because of the red tape around the athlete area, I can't show that footage here, and I ended up missing day three of the amateurs entirely.
Day Two Results
Day two eliminated a lot of my friends, though a couple made it into the finals. The events were the Husafell carry, thankfully for time over a fixed distance rather than max distance, and the Stone of Steel over bar. If you've never touched a Stone of Steel, there's nothing else like it. It's a very difficult implement.
Got Footage of Yourself?
I shot a lot more footage than made the cut. If you competed and see yourself in the video, get in touch, and I'll clip your parts out for you.
