<p>After dragging a 7,500-pound pickup truck across a parking lot during his workouts, Fred Lyons found it a bit strange that pulling 10,000 pounds in competition almost seemed easier.</p><p>The Center Grove senior recently found out why — his close friend and classmate, Cam Petty, had been applying a little pressure to the brake.</p><p>Petty reasoned that if his time and his truck were being used, he’s going to make Lyons work for it.</p><p>Not much else seems to slow down the 6-foot, 330-pound Lyons, who is beginning to make a name for himself at strongman competitions around the Midwest.</p>[sc:text-divider text-divider-title="Story continues below gallery" ]Click here to purchase photos from this gallery<p>Instead of blocking and tackling on the football field, where he had focused his energy when he was younger, Lyons now faces such challenges as pulling vehicles, lifting 200-plus-pound atlas stones onto podiums or tossing 40-pound sandbags over a 14-foot-high bar.</p><p>"Strongman’s just fun, and every one of them’s different," said Ed Lyons, Fred’s father. "There’s no egos. You can either lift the stone or you can’t. You can either pull the car or you can’t."</p><p>By the time he had reached the end of his sophomore season, Fred Lyons just didn’t feel all that passionately about football anymore. The weight room, he found, is where he could scratch his itch — so he started competing in Olympic weightlifting.</p><p>Among junior men ages 18-20 in the heavyweight (over 105 kilograms) weight class, Lyons is ranked 37th nationally and third in Indiana. He has put up 65 kg (143 pounds) in the snatch and 96 kg (211.6 pounds) in the clean and jerk.</p><p>When he heard about a strongman competition in Huntington at the end of last year, he decided to give it a shot and fell in love with it immediately. He went to Columbus, Ohio in March to watch the Arnold Strongman Classic, where many of the competitors usually seen on World’s Strongest Man shows on ESPN were in action.</p><p>Lyons feels that his prowess in Olympic lifting, which is vastly different from powerlifting, gives him an edge in strongman competition from a speed and mobility standpoint. The explosive Olympic movements often translate well to lifting various awkward objects.</p><p>"It gives me the speed aspect of it," he said.</p><p>Olympic-style lifting also gave Lyons an edge at his last strongman competition, the Warrior Call in Kentucky, earlier this month. Faced with a challenge called the Hercules Hold — standing between two cars and using straps to hold the vehicles up and keep them from rolling down ramps — he was again able to put his lifting experience to work.</p><p>"What really helped me there was a thing called the hook grip," Lyons said. "In Olympic, you hook grip the bar by wrapping your thumb first and then your fingers, so it locks your thumb in. … I locked my thumbs in there, and for a good 30 minutes I couldn’t feel my thumbs afterward."</p><p>He did, however, keep the cars up for 59.78 seconds, well ahead of anybody in his age group and second among all of the competitors across every division. By winning the teen men’s heavyweight division, Lyons qualified for the 2019 United States Strongman nationals.</p><p>In between now and then, he hopes to compete every couple of months — and it’s not like he doesn’t have enough other activities to say busy. Lyons has a role in the school play and serves as a mentor for fourth-graders and middle school students. He also started a remote-control flying club at Center Grove, one that has gone from two members at its inception to some 20 students flying drones around the high school fieldhouse.</p><p>Next year, he hopes to be at Indiana State, Ball State or Purdue and working toward his career goal of becoming a STEM teacher. He hasn’t ruled out maybe returning to the football field when he’s in college — "There’s not a feeling like hitting someone else," he said — but it’s clear that Lyons is more interested in harnessing his strength in other areas, sometimes quite literally.</p><p>"It’s forced me to challenge myself," Lyons said. "Especially lifting alone, it’s even harder, to tell myself, ‘You can put more weight on the bar,’ and do it. And then sometimes having the failure but learning how to get back from it."</p>
