By Gary Chappell

FORMER World’s Strongest Man Eddie “The Beast” Hall is set to appear at the PCA British Finals on Sunday, October 18 and the British bodybuilding community has taken notice.

Since retiring from strongman, Hall has moved from the deadlift platform into combat sports, boxing and physique work. His appearance at one of the biggest weekends in UK bodybuilding is another sign of his drive to keep pushing physical boundaries.

Long before any of that, at the height of his strongman fame, I sat down with Hall for an interview that turned out to be far more personal than I expected.

The world saw an unstoppable force. But as a journalist and as a competitive bodybuilder who knows the mental side of forcing the body to change, I wanted to look past the trophies. During our chat in 2018, Hall spoke openly about severe childhood anxiety, depression and his mental health, with an honesty that is still rare among elite athletes.

For Hall, training was not just about winning. It was how he coped.

With The Beast heading to the PCA British Finals, here is my 2018 interview with him again, a reminder that the heaviest weights he ever carried were not made of iron.

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*This article was written by Gary Chappell and was first published by the Daily Express in 2018.

EDDIE HALL is the strongest man in the world. He is the first and only person to lift half a tonne. He can walk along pulling a plane. There is almost no feat of strength that is beyond him. But to get there almost cost him his marriage and his relationship with his two children. But it may also have cured a depression and anxiety that threatened to end his life.

His skin-tight laser blue Superman T-shirt hugged his 27-stone frame and made him look more akin to a comic character as he bounded out of a black taxi on London’s Lower Thames Street.

Fresh from gracing ITV’s famous couch on This Morning, he laughed while regaling how he narrowly avoided swearing on live TV while chatting with Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby.

He has every reason to be relaxed; he is the World’s Strongest Man – the sporting title he craved for so long – his family are set up for life and acting lessons are well underway as he plans to emulate his hero Arnold Schwarzenegger.

As we walk alongside the Thames, Hall takes every giant step as if he does not have a care in the world, no hint of the time he locked himself in the school toilets, rocking back and forth in a desperate bid to ease his anxiety.

No hint of downing bottles of whisky as a 14-year-old to drown the depression, or the fact a future as an Olympic swimmer had gone terribly wrong, or the hours spent throwing up because he could not face the every-day task of meeting pals in Stoke-on-Trent or enjoying a family meal.

No hint of the fact his training for the World’s Strongest Man almost crushed his marriage and made him a stranger to his children.

No hint of enjoying the thought that his sporting ambition could lead to his death, thus ridding him of the plague of mental health problems.

In his autobiography, Strongman: My Story, first released last year but updated this month with a special diary of his World's Strongest Man victory, Hall's voice is captured brilliantly as he describes a boisterous childhood with his two brothers, a strong bond with his nan, fights with 20 police officers and how strongman saved his life.

Squeezing us both on to a bench in the baking heat, Hall finally gave a glimpse of the pain behind the hard-man exterior.

“When I was 12 or 13 my nan was diagnosed with cancer,” he says. “I was having a really hard time at school, I was thrown out of the swimming club – which was going to be my career – I was always in trouble with the police, in trouble with my parents, my family, always getting into fights and, I don’t know, it just f****** hit me hard. I got huge anxiety attacks where I couldn’t leave the house.

“Sometimes I just couldn’t go to school and ultimately that’s why I got expelled because, when I was there, I just didn’t want to be there. I was always in panic mode.

“I’d always be wanting to go to the toilet to sit on my own and just rock back and forth and just calm down and get the anxiety out.

“If I had to go out for a family meal or go out with mates, I’d be throwing up before I went out, I’d be that anxious.

“Doctors put me straight on Prozac and straight into counselling. I was on them for about four years and it did help. Then I started doing strongman and it just disappeared.”

Except that it did not. Not entirely. Thrown out of swimming’s World Class Potential Programme after clashing with its “military” discipline, Hall found he was naturally gifted elsewhere too. At just 17 years old he could deadlift a quarter of a tonne. His unbelievable early strength was his route from no-hoper to achiever.

Five years later he was the UK’s Strongest Man, a title he went on to win for six successive years.

The pinnacle, however, was the world title.

But such feats of strength appeared easy compared the road to get there.

Hall describes it as his suicide mission; when the big black dog returned.

“Five weeks before I won it, my wife was basically packing her bags... she was gone, she was out the house,” he says.

“I had to beg her to give me five more weeks just to let me win the World’s Strongest Man.

“I promised her I’d win it and that our life would get better. And thank f*** I won it because, honest to God, that saved my marriage.

“You see, because of my depression I didn’t really give a s*** if I died doing it because, unless I won the World’s Strongest Man, there was no point in me living anyway.

“In a way it was my suicide. It was a win-win for me; if I died along the way, I died, and if I won, I’d achieve the dream.

“I didn’t care about my well-being. I didn’t care about anybody around me – my wife, my kids, my family, mum, dad, brothers – I didn’t give a f***.

“I was training four hours a day, physio two hours a day, stretching an hour a day, hot-cold treatments an hour a day, hyperbaric an hour a day, meditation, I was sleeping 13 hours a day, food prep, eating food.

“Honestly, no joke, I would see my wife and kids for an hour or two a week at most.

“And that put so much strain on me mentally because, if I failed, all that f****** sacrifice would have been for nothing. And that in itself made me very anxious and very depressed.

“I was paying my wife no attention. I would f*** up Christmas, birthdays, meals out, I wouldn’t do anything because I was obsessed with strongman.

“It just got to the point where my wife just didn’t have a husband and my kids didn’t have a dad.

“My son Maximus didn’t know me. I’ve got a nine-year-old daughter as well who I don’t know. I’m getting to know her now but I didn’t because I spent so much f****** time obsessed with strongman.”

On May 28, 2017 Hall was finally crowned World’s Strongest Man – on the 40th anniversary of the competition – in Botswana.

Smoother times are now ahead.

“I can honestly say that, since I’ve won the title, the depression has disappeared,” he says.

“I can now look in the mirror and be content, happy and see success. And that for me made all the worries as a kid disappear.

“All that stress and strain of your career, your GCSEs; that was my middle finger to all those teachers saying, ‘You’re going to be a nobody, you’re going to be in jail or dead’."

If anything in this interview resonates with you, support is available. Visit FrontDouble's Helplines section for mental health resources.

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