Claire Myler starts from the top, then works her way down. The concussions come first, then the brain bruising. Next is the broken nose, the cheek, the jaw. She’s strained her neck, broken her right collarbone (three times), separated and dislocated her left shoulder, torn her rotator cuff, dislocated her elbow and done her wrist.
Both hands have been broken, every finger too and all her ribs (not all at once, that’d be extreme - and Myler knows better than most when to apply that adjective). There’s the sacrum, the ACL, the MCL, the PCL in both knees. Both menisci have been victims, albeit that may have something to do with age (she did, after all, turn 50 this year).
Both feet. Every toe, at least once. Oh, and there’s the nail in her leg, running roughly a foot long through her left femur from hip to knee, the result of a renegade motorbike powering over it like a lorry over a spilled chunk of lumber after she skid off her own motorbike in a race a few years ago.
Strength is a complex notion. It is as mentally intangible as it is physically tangible. And while there is a case to be made that anyone enduring 40-plus broken bones without any visible sign of wear and tear beyond some "weird-looking" fingers qualifies as strong, such a body would likely not be the bookies’ favourite to claim the title of world’s strongest woman over 50, in November 2022.
And yet...
“I was in a different gym recently and there was a white board on one of the walls where people could sign it, to say they’d been there,” Myler recalls. “And I signed it, ‘the strongest old bird in the world’.” Myler smiles softly, letting the claim settle in the air for a moment. “Not many people can write that.”
Myler is 50 and a half years old. She spends 40 hours a week working in pre-sales for an IT company. By traditional sporting standards, she exists well outside the parameters of apex athlete. Yet, in November she was competing at the official strongwoman championship in Daytona, Florida, the zenith of strongman competitions, and laying siege to the title of world’s strongest woman over 50 and world’s third strongest woman over 40, by the narrowest of margins.
It is a claim to fame which not many can boast, particularly not at 50, and one which Myler surely never envisaged for herself. Still, it’s arguably a more than appropriate bullet point in a frankly absurd sporting CV, from Olympic-level slalom-kayaking, to snowboarding, skiing, mountain biking, motorbike racing and bodybuilding. Strongwoman? Go on then.
But this year has been particularly extraordinary. In less than 12 months, Myler has become one of the world’s leading strongwoman athletes, competing in 11 competitions around the world and earning titles such as Wales’ strongest woman below 82kg and the UK’s 10th strongest woman overall. Just before Christmas, the Welshwoman deadlifted 260kg, about three times her body weight, to smash Wales’ women’s opens weight and masters record.
“It’s a bit like being Batman,” Myler offers as a way of translating the sport to those uninitiated to the male-version which has long occupied UK television sets during the winter holidays. “People are confused about what you do and why. You’re very cool but also a little bit of an oddity. You’re often wearing strange outfits [spandex and leotards are quite regular uniforms]. You do amazing things that defy logic and often have unexplained bruises.”
On a more technical level, strongman combines movement and strength exercises to produce a more physically taxing, all-encompassing hybrid sport. Competitors pull, push, lift, hurl, carry, hold, press and race with anything heavy and obscure, from dumbbells and atlas stones to cars and old fridges.
Where powerlifting and bodybuilding hinge on technique and style, such details are irrelevant in strongman. Just get it done, that’s the MO.
It offers some traction to her claim that she’s not actually that strong (or as strong as the other women in the sport who are half her age). By means of evidence, she pulls out her phone and points to a photo of herself lugging a four-door truck by a harness around her waist. “It’s crazy,” she says, “but you could do it too.”
This writer smiles politely and opts against arguing; the thought of lugging a suitcase up the stairs is more than enough.
Myler may weigh 88kg at the moment, but she’s a fierce believer in the power of athleticism and competitive drive, attributes she inherited directly from her late father, an ex-military man who hails from Bangor, Wales.
Dovetailed with an indoctrinated appetite for the extreme, Myler’s life was destined for sport. The military lifestyle meant Myler's early life was spent in Dorset, before moving to Builth Wells in mid-Wales and eventually Gloucester to be closer to Myler's sporting coaches. But it was her fearless character, inculcated into her by her father, she speaks about with vivid recall: riding on the back of her dad’s motorbike at the age of six or scything down a mountain on a snowboard. “Basically, if it was mildly hazardous, I did it,” she says.
The moments were stage-setting, but the appealing simplicity of Myler’s persona as a self-ascribed adrenaline junkie risks ignoring the more seminal aspect of her athletic prowess, which is that Myler is a sucker for structure. Her thrill-seeking is calculated. At the world championship in Daytona, Myler’s bag was stacked with an outfit change for every event, each change of clothes carefully constructed to give Myler optimal performance advantage, all the way down to socks. That level of careful calibration is typical for Myler.
“For me, I get anxious if I don’t have structure,” she says. “I’m a list writer. Everything I do is about efficiency and optimisation. When I’m making breakfast in the morning, it’s like 'right, what’s the timing for this?'
“I don’t leave anything to chance. The best way to control your chance of winning is to cut out chance.” She decides on a metaphor. “There’s a concept that if you have £10, you need to spend it wisely. If you waste 10 cents blowing your hair out of your face, that’s 10 pence you could have used optimising another area. So take all of those external factors away and you don’t have to think about it.”
For strongwoman, that philosophy can make Myler a nightmarish opponent. It also helps keep her competing at the top level aged 50.
It was a lack of structure which eventually led Myler to the strongman world. When her father fell ill with cancer, Myler spent more time taking care of him and less time focusing on herself. Without any goals or structure, Myler slipped into a state of inertia.
“My dad would never want me to quit on anything,” she says. “He would always want me to live life to the fullest. And while he was ill, we were spending a lot of time taking care of him, I just got fat, and you know when you see a photo and you go, 'oh, that’s me?'”
A trip to the gym eventually led to a dabbling in bodybuilding, which led to a new competitive passion for three years, as is Myler’s wont. She painted her sculpted body orange and pushed herself to “insane limits” until last October. Then Myler gave strongwoman a crack.
Fast forward 12 months, Myler boasts nearly 2,500 followers on her strongwoman Instagram page. She trains regularly at Spartan Training Centre near Ruabon, Wrexham, dedicating anywhere from 14 to 18 hours a week to training. On the day that we’re speaking, she has just secured her first-ever sponsor in Cerberus Strength, a specialist in strongman and strongwoman training gear with just shy of 42,000 followers on Instagram.
Myler doesn’t entertain the notion that her stock is rising for long. That her athletic life currently exists within strongwoman is no coincidence but rather the latest coping mechanism in a long queue of them.
“My whole life is like that,” she says. “I always say you don’t get to a certain age without experiencing some sort of trauma. We all have. And it affects everyone differently. A lot of people enter the sport from different backgrounds, many from personal struggles or moments of trauma. But for me, my whole life is like one big coping mechanism.”
Of course, the lifestyle breeds its fair share of challenges. On a slightly humorous but no less cumbersome level, Myler discovered this year that not a single one of her winter coats fits her. Her office wardrobe has become utterly redundant — “my biceps are so big!” Putting on a pair of brown, fur-lined boots this morning required lying down on the sofa with her feet up in the air as she forced her calves into the shoes.
Myler laughs as she describes the moments, but there are more pressing challenges, not least navigating the choppy waters of identity, with a number of female athletes questioned about their sexuality, consumption of sports-enhancing drugs or even their anatomy.
On the day Myler broke the 260kg record, she also beat a man in the gym who had just recorded his personal best of 250kg. Myler says the man insisted he go again.
“I told him he should, he didn’t want an old bird beating him,” she says, but such moments rarely tug at her. She wears make-up to compete. Her nails (today, a polished aqua-green with intermittent black stripes on various fingers) are done, the thumbs filed down because they get in the way. “I’m quite girly really, you wouldn’t know that if you saw me in the gym,” she admits.
Myler acknowledges that not all women feel this way, nor are all as unflappable in their want for new challenges. In fact, the sport is often at the mercy of female athletes who suddenly find themselves gripped by anxiety, nerves or a wave of no confidence, and pull out of the competition or refuse to sign up altogether. The result is a watered-down competitive field and – as is often the case – cancelled events.
The phenomenon is not exclusive to strongwoman. A plethora of studies have shown that women are less likely than men to engage in new activities due to the threat of failure or feeling ill-equipped. But for those women fighting for equal competition money in strongwoman, the diluted female field poses a real threat and can even deter future athletes.
“We need to take full advantage of equal opportunity,” Myler says. “You can’t shout about equal pay and being treated equally and then not do everything in your power to achieve it. That’s just shouting about it and waiting for someone to fix it for you. It doesn’t work like that. You have to empower yourself.”
Myler knows it’s easier said than done, but she hopes she can inspire more women to believe in themselves while not fearing failure.
She pulls back her long-sleeved shirt to reveal a small tattoo inscribed in black cursive on the inside of her right bicep (which, it must be said, is quite large). In Latin, it reads: Live life without fear. “Basically, if it scares you, it means it’s good," she adds. "It’ll give you that rush.”
It is another vestige of her father, who died before he could catch a glimpse of his daughter competing on the strongwoman stage. Myler admits her regret, having spent a number of winter holidays in front of the television with her dad watching the very competition she now calls hers.
We move on to goals, and in unerring Myler style, she has plenty. Despite being 50, she is considering competing in the over-40 category next year to satiate her craving for competition. She wants another crack at the championship, too, to eclipse her third-place finish. It’ll be harder, but Myler has never shied away from a challenge.
“I might be 50, but I’m still on there,” she says. She claimed gold at her final competition in December, beating two competitors half her age. It sets the stage nicely for 2023. She is, after all, the world’s strongest old bird.
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