Athletes spent their Saturday competing in the 8th Annual Star City Strongman competition, held as part of Star City StrongFest.
By 10 a.m. on Saturday morning, Heather Beamer’s third deadlift of the day weighed in at 285 pounds. She screamed in victory as she threw down the weight. She was done, at least with that lift. Her friends and family cheered her on from the side of Roanoke’s Elmwood Park stage.
“They’re basically picking up a refrigerator here,” the event emcee said of the weight.
Just a few minutes later, Sidney Scott of Fayetteville, WV exceeded the Virginia state record for the deadlift in her weight division. She lifted 285 pounds, then 315, and finally 335.
And that was just the beginning.
Athletes from states including North Carolina, Tennessee, Connecticut, West Virginia, Maryland, Georgia and Wisconsin spent Saturday competing in the 8th Annual Star City Strongman competition, which was held as part of Star City StrongFest.
In the afternoon, professional athletes in the Professional Strongman League championship took the stage. They traveled to Roanoke from countries including France, Canada and the United Kingdom, according to a September 29 press release.
Though records of every variety – state, personal, and in-between – were set on the stage, weightlifting was only a portion of the reason for the festival.
The overall theme of the Star City StrongFest was mental wellness, according to event organizer Leigh Stover. That included highlighting ways in which people work together to support one another, she says.
The event was conceived out of the annual Star City Strongman, a strength competition that has been held as a standalone event in the Roanoke Valley since 2016— prior to that, the strongman competition was held as a part of the Virginia Commonwealth Games, according to Stover.
This year, Star City Strongman paired up with the Partnership for Community Wellness and The Noke Training to visualize a new festival, one that would promote both physical strength and mental wellbeing.
From there, the event grew. Tudor House, Herren Project, and The Rescue Mission came on board.
Each nonprofit serves the community by supporting needs that include crisis intervention, suicide prevention, substance use disorder and youth resiliency, according to the press release.
Whereas one might look at a traditional weight lifting competition as focusing solely on physical strength, doing so would overlook the tremendous community that these athletes find when they train together.
“The sense of belonging is important,” The Noke Training owner Rebecca Dameron says.
It has been shown that a sense of belonging and social connectedness is tied to an individual’s mental wellbeing, according to a May 3 report released by the US surgeon general.
Dameron recounts a conversation she had with a gym member who said that, without weight lifting, he would probably have turned to drinking because he was under so much stress.
“He started coming to work out and he’s been very regular. He said that saved him from [drinking],” Dameron says.
When asked about the connection between physical and mental health, Stover provides a laundry list of examples, citing athlete surveys from former events.
“There have been a lot of different answers: suicide prevention, people in recovery from substance misuse, people who are battling eating disorders or body dysmorphia, or people who just feel like they didn’t fit in. Then they found Strongman or just the lifting community in general and have found the support they need,” she says.
“The power of one person helping another is exponentially multiplied when they are part of a
community, especially a community they trust, believe in and have fun with,” said Herren Project’s Director of Active Engagement Pam Rickard in the press release.
“Community connections are critical to sustainable social support,” said the Rescue Mission of Roanoke Chief Executive Officer Lee Clark in that same release.
Stover found that community in a weight lifting gym in 2013.
“It was a really cool experience to walk into a gym and see girls that looked like me flipping tires, dead lifting cars, things like that,” she says. She competed for the first time a year later.
“And I just didn’t stop,” she says.
