More power to Tourlestrane strongman Ivan Gannon
Sharon Dolan D’Arcy meets Ivan ‘The Engine’ Gannon, a Tourlestrane native with five Ireland Strongest Man titles and one UK title, who is hoping to set an Irish record in the Masters Log Lift later this year
WHEN Ivan Gannon was in Drimina National School in Tubbercurry, Gaelic football was his love. He was self-professed “never any good” at Banada Abbey Secondary School with one teacher even telling him he was in the wrong place and was only there for the sport. However, the football was another thing entirely. A local GAA manager in Tourlestrane at the time, Michael Henry “just gripped me”, he says and got him into the game encouraging him to win and have it in his heart. He says “that got into me” and the next thing was, taking on that winning attitude he played under 14s and under 16s and got into the senior team but wasn’t good enough. He said that advice and encouragement from Mr Henry has stood to him to this day. Looking back on his younger years, Ivan always had an interest in weights – he would admire older fellas doing weights and was fascinated by it. Growing up in a family with five siblings on a farm in Tourlestrane, he and two of his brothers as teenagers, would get work on Saturdays with a forestry contractor planting trees in the forest next to their family farm. So they were always physically strong then, and every evening when he and his older brother would come in from school they’d make up weights with round biscuit tins.
He didn’t realise it at the time, but it was an ideal early training ground for his future strongman career.
It was the early 1990s, and he and his brothers would be fooling around doing the overhead press and squats. They had no barometer as to how good or bad they were until one day another fella who was known to be strong, worked out with them and he couldn’t even lift their bar. That made him think about his capabilities. However, in his late teens “the drinking and that took over and the weights and the football went by the wayside, and I sort of thought where am I going here and pulled myself back”. As he was involved with the FCA, and with secondary school not his forte, he decided to apply for the regular army. He got called to Finner Camp near Ballyshannon, Co Donegal, where he did a few months but “it just wasn’t for me,” he adds.
Working in guttering for a while with O’Hara Gutters, he then moved to Galway. Newly married to Sharon and living in his wife’s homeplace of
Rosscahill in Connemara, he started going to the Killannin gym there. He came across a fella called Cathal Walsh who is a very good friend of his now. Walsh told him he should take up powerlifting which, for the uninitiated, comprises squat, bench, and deadlifting. And so, he started training with his friend, and really took to it. So much so that the two of them decided to go to Belfast to compete both for the first time. Both men won their classes, quite an achievement for first-time out competitors and they were asked to compete again.
At that point, Ivan was self-employed in the guttering business but all the while he was considering getting into the Strongman contests – he even recalls telling a friend he wanted to do so.
Roughly 12 years ago, he decided to contact Northern Ireland man, Glen Ross who is the creator of Ireland’s and the UK’s Strongest Man competitions and founder of Ultimate Strongman TV. Ross is also a fivetime winner of UK Strongest Man and three-time winner of Britain’s Strongest Man. He called him and
“he couldn’t have been nicer”. He told him they were running a novice event near Belfast and to come along and compete.
He gave him the number of a Kildare champion who Ivan rang and he put him through the events. He entered the competition of 15 men and came in 6th place. The next competition on the calendar was one local to Galway at the Warehouse Gym which he entered and came in at seventh place - narrowly missing out on qualifying for the All-Ireland.
Performing strongly in those early career competitions gave him the impetus to start taking Strongman competition participation seriously. He says:
“I made up my own equipment and had my own shed. I went into it the right way – there was no drinking, no out late, I was training, and I had a programme. And from there on in I always came in. I did it the way the champion showed me and then me and him were coming in top in Ireland at it,” he said.
How does he feel about Strongman as an individual sport which is so different to his team sports like the football he played?
H feels he can’t trust anyone at it and that as a sport, it’s really down to yourself, explaining:
“If you are the top of the pile you don’t want to see someone else coming behind you to take it so you are going to give them that push left or right to keep them off that top podium.” However, his sportsman instincts take over and he says “me as a sportsman I go straight over to them and say this is how I do it, and 90% of the people say thanks.”
But Michael Henry and GAA football back in county Sligo is still on his mind to this day – “it is all about heart – that really struck me.” And yet I can also see his hugely competitive side when we talk about this, he says, “when I go to a competition, I am there to win and if I don’t win - I want to be there in the top five.”
And is he competing currently? His next event is to set an Irish record in the Irish Masters log lift event in Cork on December 4, for which he has just started training. His aim is to press 160kgs. “That’s a massive log for anyone to catch in Ireland at a Masters,” he says it is achievable as he got a 170 not so long ago.
“I am 42 and I got an invite to the UK Masters. There’s no limit, but the
LEFT: Ivan Gannon carries the Irish flag at the 2021 UK’s Strongest Man competition.
thing is, I like to keep rocking with the young lads because when I hit the Masters you should be winning it well in the top two or three anyway.” Following Cork, he will head off to the UK in August 2023 for the UK Strongest Man competition. He already took home the UK Strongest Man title in 2016 for the 110kg category. 2016 and 2017 were his best years as he also won the 110kg Ireland Strongest Man 2016/2017, the Republic Ireland’s Strongest Man 2017, and Ireland’s Novice in 2016.
Diet is hugely important for all elite sportspeople, and for powerlifters particularly important. Breakfast consists of a glass of orange juice, a bowl of porridge with berries and vitamins. Then he goes to his shed to do 40 minutes to an hour of training. Post-training, he has a pound of venison or mince. And then it’s into work where he will eat five eggs and a couple of slices of bread and two rashers mid-morning. 1pm comes around and he will have dinner with a burger for example. At 4pm, he will eat pasta or perhaps mince. He tells me he is not a fan of chicken and finds turkey meat dry. When he returns home in the evening, he will eat whatever is left over from the family’s dinner. He doesn’t seek out professional advice from a dietician or nutritionist even though his work colleagues advise him he should. He rejects too much advice saying, “to me it’s common knowledge - you need your water but not too much. If you are drinking 1.5 litres, it’s more than enough because you get it from tea…and you are flushing the good toxins out.” Avocado, nuts, salmon, and mackerel – all those foods that are good sources of beneficial oils and fats are what he tries to consume. I wonder what his grocery bill must be like and he pre-empts my question explaining it is the one form of sponsorship he actually gets. Apollo Health and Wellness in Galway sponsors his vitamins, and his meat comes from McGrath’s Family Butchers in Mervue.
Ivan had a health scare earlier this year after developing a groin injury in February. He was training and the next thing he knew he felt sore. He went to the doctor who poked around and suspected a hernia. What it was, was that someone had told him he wasn’t drinking enough water, so he started to increase his water intake, but his bladder wasn’t used to it and as a result, he weakened his muscles. Then when he was doing stretches with the classes he gives, his groin went. He tells me he’s feeling 95 percent normal again now. As part of his recovery process, he prepared himself for the 105kg lift and thought it was “make or break” with the sport however, he is now doing deadlifts of 120kg or 150kg and feeling “grand” as he says himself.
Back to Sligo, he tells me his parents and siblings are still living at home. I ask him what Sligo means to him and he says, “any competition I do I’m represented as Sligo – that’s where my family are and that’s where I grew up.” It really is as straightforward as that for Ivan Gannon.
He’d like to get home to Sligo more often. However, he is married in Galway and on the road at weekends with his three daughters. His eldest daughter plays Under-17 and Under-19 soccer for Galway and is gone playing every weekend.
He says she’s fairly competitive “like myself” and he would be shocked if she didn’t follow him into the strongest (woman) competitions. He regularly has his daughters out squatting in the gym adjacent to the house – even the youngest one who is 10 years-old, and when he is at work the girls use his gym. He tells me when he goes to Cork to attempt to break the Irish log record, the Gannon girls are all planning to go to cheer him on.
Apart from working full-time as a caretaker with the Galway Roscommon Education and Training Board (GRETB) in Mervue, he teaches twelve people in a boot camp class three evenings a week. He laughs telling me the people who attend his classes know and love his attitude at this stage. “I nearly bring the military training into it,” he states. And he doesn’t take any BS (his words) saying, “you are listening and if you are not on your bike”. He explains that he has himself mentally behaving like that to compete effectively. When I ask is he hard on himself, he answers: “If you want to be anything in life, you have to push yourself upward…you have to want to win, the hunger has to be there, you have to get it from a young age…keep your mouth shut, turn up and be that person.”
At the same time, he tells me he is “very humble” but on the day of a competition a different beast emerges, and he is very much there to win. Once the competition is over, it’s back to being plain Ivan - having the craic and talking to anyone.
What’s interesting about the Ultimate Strong Man competitions, is there are no huge financial rewards for competing in them.
It is simply a case of when you win Irish titles, then you get into the history books.
As for his goals in the short-term, he is mindful that your body peaks at around age 30 and changes after age 40. Having turned 40 last year, he says if his body holds up, he’d like to win the UK’s Strongest Master title.
I ask him to tell me about the competitions and how they break-down in terms of challenges. He explains there are always five events so for example, a farmer’s walk, the log, Conan’s Wheel, deadlifting or it could be the stones, or a car-grip hold.
Typically, a competitor will be given six to eight weeks’ notice of what the final five will be. He adds, “I keep everything in my belly, nobody knows what I am good at and I turn up on the day.” He equates the discipline to being like boxing in that you are on your own.
But company is important too and Ivan has sought the friendship of, and so tapped into a network of strong men around the country who he can lean on for advice. He has met great friends along the way like ‘Big Phil’ (Phil Morgan - an Irish Strongman) whom he will gladly do a show for because he has great time for him.
We talk about the names the strong men are given.
I’m intrigued as to how they get those names, and do they have to earn them? Names like Warrior Will and The Limerick Lion are not easily earned. He tells me that Glen Ross of Ultimate more or less awards them when he sees a certain level of consistency from the men in the competitions. He has great time for Pa O’Dwyer aka The Limerick Lion. He says he is a man who has been around the world but is still in awe of things and he laughs recalling the two of them waiting for a train in Milton Keyes after a competition and big strongman Pa got a fright when the train suddenly pulled into the station. He also has great time for 56-year-old Mark Felix, a Grenadian-English strong man who has competed at a record 17 World’s contests. He describes him as a very nice man telling me he once went for a walk with him and the knowledge he learned in those 20 minutes was priceless.
As for his own Strongman name, he has earned one and is called ‘The Engine’. I’m interested to know how he got that name, and he laughs telling me – “it’s the name of my gym”.
Last but certainly not least, he is adamant he wouldn’t be where he is today without his wife, Sharon. She knows his routine and is “100 percent behind me and that’s everything… she’s there always pushing me”. It’s all about having the positivity she says. “My wife would say to me what’s wrong with you like…I’d have five AllIrelands…a rake of trophies and then there’s people who did one show and go off and have the balls to do teaching and do diet plans and this and that.” He doesn’t feel he’s at the point in his life where he would be able to give teaching classes his full heart. Work friends encourage him but he knows he is very busy at this time between raising a young family, working a fulltime job, teaching boot camp classes and training for the strongman contests. “If I was taking a football team I’d want 100%,” he adds with the football analogy again.
I go away from our meeting understanding Ivan ‘The Engine’ Gannon and getting where he is coming from. And one thing is for sure - he will have a rosy future ahead of him both in Ultimate Strongman and teaching or whatever he decides to embark on. Winning and having it in his heart and mind – as Michael Henry back in Tourlestrane once told him.
“I’ll have it in the heart, and I’ll have it in the mind now like that man told me,” he says.