By MATT GERHART
Hawaii Tribune-Herald
After years of pushing, pulling and dragging, lifting and carrying – not to mention gnashing and thrashing – Kamu Wassman earned this one.
He’d built up his own form of sweat equity, and it was time to cash it in
Wassman was but a stone’s throw Saturday from finally becoming the strongest man in Hilo, though this “stone” weighed more than 300 pounds. He didn’t cling to this victory – though a sticky substance surely aided contestants in cradling what can more accurately be described as a small boulder. He grabbed it, and was the only competitor to toss his fifth stone over the bar.
“Strongman is my life,” Wassman, 31, said. “I’m going to do this until the day I die.”
After a one-year absence, the strongman competition was back by popular demand at the Big Island Substance Abuse Council’s annual summer jam at Afook Chinen Civic Auditorium and the adjacent parking lot. The sixth strongman was marked by the first wahine event, a spirited competition claimed by Oahu’s Primrose Kanoa, and a first win for Wassman, who is a perennial contender and an accomplished contestant.
Wassman, a security guard on Oahu, won the 2018 Hawaii strongman and annually competes at Oregon Feats of Strength. But but he never misses a stop in Hilo, even if this event wasn’t sanctioned like some previous BISAC competitions had been.
“My teammates always push me to do well, they want me to compete,” Wassman said. “I kind of rested for three months. I didn’t know if I was going to struggle, but I still had the drive.”
He edged Hilo’s Devin Preston, who stepped up to compete in the heavyweight class. Preston won the axel press (which resembles the clean-and-jerk) and the frame event (deadlift) and was the first to clear four atlas stones, but the reigning Hawaii middleweight strongman champion couldn’t muster a fifth.
“I like pushing myself, and it’s fun,” Preston said of stepping up in weight. “That’s how you get stronger, lifting with the bigger and stronger guys.”
The ripped 23-year-old said he usually cuts about 20 pounds to compete at middleweight.
The goal is to become a heavyweight in three years or so and reach 260 pounds. Of course, that will mean he’ll have to pack on a fair amount of fat to his chiseled frame.
“I kind of want to look the part,” he said, “but you can’t always look the part if you want to be strong.”
Former University of Hawaii football player Joey Cadiz – at 5 foot, 6 inches, he’s come to be known as Mighty Mouse at this event – claimed the lightweight division.
Wassman likes the yoke walk – it starts off as a squat, then you have to move forward and are timed – but he said the medley “almost killed me.”
Contestants carry a heavy object and a set of weights varying distances, than they pull a sled full of weights.
“My lung were burning,” said Wassman, who nevertheless won that event, too.
“I’m going to eat and rest,” he said.
The sled pull was challenging for Kanoa as well.
‘That’s where you hit a wall,” she said. “Hearing my cousin (fellow competitor Monalisa Durkan) pulled me through.”
This was Kanoa’s first strongman, but working out several times a week helped her in the axel press and frame event. She won both to finish a half-point ahead of Whittney Soares Hall, who captured the yoke walk and atlas stones.
Durkan, who won the medley and finished third, and Kanoa are cousins of BISAC CEO Hannah Preston.
“I gravitated here toward the (BISAC) mission and raising awareness for substance abuse,” Kanoa said.
Hannah Preston said she expects Hilo’s strongman to become a sanctioned event in the future and she’d like to add a masters division.