Iceland review - 2019, Qupperneq 111

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Iceland Review
after photograph in the history of Iceland. Before
our meeting, I studied the picture (which readers
can view on Instagram) for something like the
twentieth time. On the left side, there is a 17-year-
old boy slouching in his boxers: long hair, pale,
slender arms dangling uselessly by his side. He
looks like a lanky Kurt Cobain doing an impres-
sion of a dispirited lamp post. There’s a reusable
grocery bag in the background bearing the logo of
Iceland’s most economical grocery store: Bónus. It
seems oddly pertinent, a token of the boy himself: a
second-class version of the bona fide hulk flexing a
huge tattooed arm on the right side of the photo-
graph, whom viewers are expected to believe is
the same man – only six or seven years older now,
wearing a black wife beater, with shorter hair, and
a beard.
He looks like the Thor that Chris Hemsworth mod-
elled himself after for the eponymous film.
After Theodór settles into his seat, I ask him about
the boy on the left side of the photograph.
“I was built like a lamp post,” he admits. “I was 87
kilos [192 pounds] at my lightest. For a person of
my stature, which was 203 centimetres [6’8’’] at the
time, that’s skin and bones. I’ve managed to bulk
up to about 158 kilos [348 pounds]. Things have
certainly changed,” he says, laughing.
Theodór’s nonchalance, I learn, belies the price of
his transformation. On any given day, he wolfs down
three times as many calories as the average adult
male (somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000) and,
like many of his strongman peers, he has developed
sleep apnoea from the weight gain. He sleeps with a
CPAP mask, which facilitates the ventilation of his
respiratory system, but also, he tells me – greatly
mitigates the intensity of his snoring. Without the
mask, his girlfriend must take refuge from his vig-
orous snorts in another room. Churchill snored, but
only at 35 decibels (according to one source): that’s
the volume of a library.
Theodór’s snore, I imagine, is no library.
Besides the adverse effects of the weight gain,
competing in strongman also comes with its
share of injuries, of the kind that Hafþór suffered
yesterday. Although many strongmen will main-
tain – as Theodór does – that the risk of injury isn’t
greater in strongman than in any other sport, there
is research to suggest otherwise. In a paper from
2014, Paul Winwood et. al. surveyed 213 strong-
man competitors and found that 82% suffered an
injury during one year of training, which is a lot –
even when compared to the other strength sports
(powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting). Most of the
injuries are sustained during traditional events,
like the lifting of Atlas stones onto raised platforms
A 2014 paper which surveyed 213
strongman competitors found that
82% suffered an injury during one
year of training.