Mr Big standard barbell: for Gene Rychlak, the road to being the first man ever to bench 1,000 pounds began about the same time he was born

Men's Fitness, May, 2004 by Richard Rys

Last November, the International Powerlifting Association held its national championship inside a Radisson Hotel ballroom near Harrisburg, Pa. Heavy-metal music blared as Gene Rychlak approached the bench, chalked his hands, and rolled flat on his back. It took three spotters to bring the 900-pound bar from the rack to his chest. Then, in one deft motion, Rychlak lifted the massive load until his arms extended fully. He paused, holding the bar and its 14 plates motionless until the "rack" command went up. Rychlak, a 35-year-old virtual nobody from Royersford, Pa., had just set a new world record in the bench press. The lift still fills the IPA's president, Mark Chaillet, with both horror and awe. "That the body can even support that weight, and it was effortless for him," he says. "There's no other way to put it: What he did was biblical"

Afterward, as Rychlak talked to reporters, he shared his life's ambition: to be the first man to bench press 1,000 pounds. To regular gym rats, that's about 750 pounds more than they'll ever dream of lifting. To powerlifters, it is the Holy Grail, a seemingly impossible feat.

Yet even if Rychlak hits the 1,000-pound mark, the most he'll get is a medal and a couple thousand dollars, tops. There will be no big endorsements. The event probably won't even rate a mention on ESPN's SportsCenter. So the question isn't so much whether Rychlak can pull it off but, rather, why would he want to?

A GIANT IN THE MAKING

Rychlak's "home" is the 5th Street Powerhouse gym, a sagging brick building in Temple, Pa. As he talks about his circuitous path to the top, he leans back in a wooden chair, just one protein shake away from breaking it with his 6'1", 360-pound frame. His 62" chest tests the limits of his T-shirt, while his arms are stuck in a perpetual state of pump, like parentheses surrounding his medicine ball of a belly.

But the man known as "Big Dog" was once not so big. As a freshman in high school, Rychlak measured a respectable six feet, but weighed only 140 pounds. Awkward and lanky, he wasn't suited for organized athletics in his hometown of Royersford, a small burg an hour from Philadelphia. So he took refuge at Roberto's, a gym located in a supermarket basement a few towns over. "It was the East Coast version of Venice Beach, when Arnold was training at Gold's," Rychlak recalls. "It was dirty, dimly lit, hot, and intense. I fell in love"

The summer before his senior year, one of the gym's owners put Rychlak on a hard-core regimen. He spent five days a week lifting and gorged on 10,000 calories a day. He was barely recognizable when he returned to school 50 pounds heavier.

But Rychlak's obsession was about more than physical prowess. In preschool, he was forced to learn sign language. His hearing was fine, but his parents were deaf. Gene and his younger brother, Jeff, had to learn to cope at an early age. "There was a barrier there," Rychlak says of his home life. "I felt awkward. The gym was where I felt at home. I fit in"

After graduating from high school in 1987, Rychlak had trouble finding work. Then a job opened at Roberto's that allowed him to lift while he worked during the day. It was everything he wanted. Soon he began entering local competitions. In April 1995, he benched 490 pounds to win his first super-heavyweight rifle. More trophies followed, but in the sport of powerlifting, that's about all one can hope for.

"Why does a painter paint?" Rychlak says of his motivation. "I wasn't part of the in-crowd in high school. Lifting made me feel I want to be the best at what I do. To me, it's everything"

In April 1999, he benched 585 pounds, but every attempt at 600 fell short. By year's end, Rychlak stopped lifting and took a construction job. Heavy equipment replaced weights, and the only thing Rychlak racked up was points on his driver's license, which he lost for speeding. Rychlak says he never felt so low. "I couldn't have cared less about everything" he recalls. "I didn't want anything to do with lifting" Within a year, he had lost 20 pounds, along with any hope of ever becoming a professional powerlifter.

THE CHALLENGE

"You don't have any balls!" said Franz Adler when he ran into Rychlak in the spring of 2001. The 53-year-old Adler had known Rychlak from his own lifting days. "Most guys would die to do what you did," he told him. "It's a waste. Stop feeling sorry for yourself."

Adler's remarks weren't profound, but they worked. Rychlak went back to the gym and within months entered his first competition in more than a year. He abandoned his old workout routine in favor of a program involving tension bands--thick elastics that pull the bar down as you try to heave it skyward. In March 2002, Rychlak's max jumped to 620. Then, in August, he did the unthinkable: He hit the 700-pound mark. Pumped with newfound confidence, Rychlak was back on track.

"Gene just has to believe in himself," says Adler, who still gives Rychlak pep talks before every meet. "He needs to know how good he is. Because he's so humble, if you had dinner with him, you wouldn't know he was the best in the world unless you asked him."