RC: I don’t know about that one. [Laughs] It’s possible, though.
FLEX: Your signature lift is walking lunges on the gravel car park outside MetroFlex. What’s the most you ever used? RC: Oh, 315.
FLEX: All the way to the road and back — approximately 100 yards? RC: Yep. We had to do what we had to do. And before that we used to push Brian’s old pickup truck all the way down to that road and all the way back. Back in the good ol’ days, probably ’90 or ’91. We’d take turns pushing that old truck.
FLEX: Dobson told me he trained with you until you just got too strong to keep up with. RC: That’s right. That was a long time ago. It used to be me, Brian and Mark Hanlon. [Hanlon, who finished second in the super-heavy class of the 1999 NPC Junior Nationals and was later a gym owner, died of a heart attack in 2007.]
FLEX: And Branch Warren used to join in sometimes? RC: Yep. Back when we first got started, about ’90, ’91. He was just a teenager. I trained with Mark. And then Mark brought Branch in, and he trained with us from time to time. Mark trained hard and crazy. He was a maniac. Mark was why I first started training so heavy, because we were always competing against each other to see who could lift the most. Branch was still young, so he couldn’t lift as much as us — even though he was really strong for a teenager. Some of my best training days were back then — when it was me, Brian and Mark.
FLEX: You were using crazy, huge weights in the early 2000s. Did your growth even shock you in 2003? RC: I’m going to tell you the truth. I’ve never told anyone this before. I didn’t even know what I looked like till two or three weeks later [after the Olympia] in Australia when I saw a photo of me on the wall in the gym and I was like: Damn! Did I look that big onstage? That’s the first time I saw how big I looked. Before that, I didn’t have a clue. I just thought I looked like I always do. I don’t even know how we got that picture that quick, two weeks later in Australia, and it was a big ol’ poster-sized picture, too. Shocked me like nothing before or since.
FLEX: You said, “Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but don’t nobody want to lift no heavy-ass weights.” Do you think most pros don’t train hard enough? RC: I ain’t never really seen nobody else’s videos but I’ve heard people who look at Jay Cutler’s videos and other guy’s videos say I train a lot harder. So I can only go by what people say to me.
FLEX: Other than yourself, who do you think trained the hardest? RC: I don’t have a clue because I’ve never really trained with anybody that much down here. And most of them [other pros] who come here, can’t train in this atmosphere. I remember we had Melvin [Anthony]
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