I know I bitch and moan about owning my gym and talk about what a drag it is sometimes. Like when members break my garage door and I have to get out of bed and drive down here and fix it, when I'm stuck here working while everyone gets a relaxing vacation or when our massive school tax bill is due and we have no money to pay it. There are, however, those days when some cool shit happens, I always say the best thing about being at Iron Sport is you never know who is going to walk through our doors and do something cool. This happened Monday night when a young couple came strolling in and the guy said he just moved into Philly and wanted to join. Right away there was no mistaking this guy was a lifter, a big dude of about 290lbs with a massive upper body and god damn this dude had an itchy trigger finger. The whole time I was trying to get his info into my computer he's trying to look past me into the gym with a grin on his face and a wild look in his eye like a hungry lion looking into a butcher shop. My computer was running a little slow and I thought the dude was going to jump over the counter, stiff arm me and run into the weightroom.
I finally get done getting his membership in order and was doing something at the front counter. It couldn't have been no longer than ten minutes later when one of the lifters from my gym came up to me and said "Yo Steve, come on out here, this new guy has 800lbs on the bar and is looking around the room for 25's". I went out to see what was going on and the new guy has our deadlift bar loaded up with a combination of 45's and 100lb plates and was putting more on. He finally got his bar loaded up, and then this happened . . .
Now THAT is a gym debut if I ever saw one! He didn't just walk through the doors of the gym that day, he ripped the fuckers off the hinges! His name is Aria Attia and he looking to break the all time deadlift record as a 275er. I'm really looking forward to see how much this kid eventually pulls because judging by what I saw I'd say it's going to be a lot more.