Bob Peoples and the Unthinkable: Part 1

Published 10:24 am Friday, October 28, 2022

 “Why on earth would you even consider such a thing?” Juanita Peoples half pleaded and half demanded. From all accounts, Juanita, the wife of the then world’s strongest man, Bob Peoples, was a very kind and compassionate lady.  She and her husband built a wonderful life together with a beautiful young daughter. She also worked as a special education teacher which required so much tenderness and patience, but even the kindest and most patient of women have their limits.

She found one of her husband’s notebooks lying around the house, which was nothing unusual as he was a huge advocate for keeping detailed training records. Just another of her husband’s training booklets, but she gave it a quick glance in passing. What she saw was so shocking that she had to stop and make sure that her eyes were not playing tricks on her. To her dismay, it was exactly as she had seen at first glance. It was so shocking to her that even she could not begin to understand why he would do something this risky. It would put their marriage, the family, and everything they had built together in jeopardy.

We can safely say that Juanita Peoples was not an easy lady to shock. After all, she was married to the world’s strongest man, Bob Peoples, and he did not get that way by accident. It started with him creating places for him to lift weights around their farm. There was now a place in the barn, one out in front of the corn patch, and of course the rusty old dumbbell that sat in the corner of the home. I am sure she could easily accept him wanting a healthy hobby to do in his free time. So, what if he had an outdoor lifting area in front of the garden? It was weird, but it really wasn’t hurting anything.

But her husband’s passion only grew, and he next wanted to dig the crawl space into a basement under his home by hand so that he would have an indoor place to lift weights. For months he toiled with a pick and shovel lying on his stomach in the freezing cold of the winter and the sweltering heat of the summer knowing that each shovel full of dirt brought him that much closer to his own basement gym. Sure, there were other chores to be done, but Juanita could understand the need to have an indoor place to train.

Before long he began altering his farm equipment to help him lift more weights. There was that time when he wanted to do negative deadlifts. He was using so much weight that it was a chore to lift the weight up so he could lower it down slowly. So, he began rigging up the tractor so it could hoist up the weight with the hydraulics saving him energy to do his negative training. With each new endeavor, she felt that her husband would eventually grow complacent with his places to train and equipment to train with.

But that was before she came home to find him on the little swinging bridge in front of their house walking across it with hundreds of pounds loaded on his back. The bridge supports were trained to their limits as they deflected with all the weight. The wooden planks bowed and creaked like they would snap at any moment. He could have killed himself with such a stunt. Instead of him becoming complacent, his training antics were becoming even more dangerous.

Despite any misgivings, she took all of these in stride. Sure, she didn’t always understand his drive to do those things, but like many spouses do, she learned how to live with them. Then there was the time he got so frustrated from making no progress that he loaded it all up into his wagon and dumped it into the sinkhole in the back of his property. That event was only trumped by the night when she woke to the realization her husband was gone from the house, scaring her to death, only to find out he had hooked up the tractor and wagon and gone down to rescue those weights from the sinkhole. He had become consumed with making progress and moving the deadlift record into uncharted territory.

Yes, Bob Peoples had done a lot of unorthodox things on his journey to become the greatest dead lifter in history, and it was hard to argue with the results. He was the first man to surpass 650 by breaking the standing official world record. Then he went on to become the first to lift 700, then 710, and on to the unfathomable 725 at 181 for the first four times bodyweight lift. So yes, his methods which seemed like madness worked and his wife Juanita could never deny that. But what she saw in his training book was too much, even for her good-natured soul.

Bob Peoples became convinced that keeping a training journal was imperative to his training. From 1936 on, the year he won the Tennessee State Weightlifting Championships, he was very precise about his training. This is an invaluable tool for any lifter. First, it can be a way to stay encouraged by looking back and seeing progress. Second, a lifter can see if their newly implemented training and techniques improved their lifting. Third, it can also show how new strategies could have made their results worse. Adding more workouts, using more weight more frequently, etc., are not always helpful and can sometimes even reverse progress. A training log easily allows the athlete to trace the problem back to its genesis. Lastly, journals are also useful because they allow the lifter to record things other than sets, reps, weights, and training frequency. A lifter can add all sorts of notes about elements that can also impact performance, such as sleep patterns, illness, nutrition, and more, to show how these impact training results.

Four of Peoples training logs survive, and as one thumbs through them it is easy to spot where Peoples mentioned trying a new exercise or starting to use a new piece of equipment (often that he invented). He had taken to keeping records around 1935. Most of his logs were kept in little VC Fertilizer booklets. Samuel Tate Morgan, in partnership with Eugene Morehead, and Louis Carr, established the Durham Fertilizer Company around 1881 in North Carolina. The company hit upon using a waste product of the tobacco production process – the stems – to make fertilizer. By 1985, the company grew into the Virginia-Carolina Chemical (Fertilizer) Company, which was headquartered in Richmond, VA. This company used all types of promotional materials for their clients, including hand mirrors, watches, and these little booklets for farmers to keep their agricultural records in. Peoples decided to use the little booklets for his training logs.

And this is where Juanita discovered the problem. As she looked through her husband’s training log, she saw his plan for his new routine which he hoped would propel him to his new and unfathomable goal of 750 pounds in the deadlift. He had included not just a place for sets, reps, weights, and even how he was feeling during each workout, but he had included two other very unnerving categories as well. Reading these caused her to be both concerned for her husband’s safety but also angered that he would put his life and what they had created as a family in jeopardy.

 To be continued…