Powerlifting physicist pulls 11-ton truck

Jennifer Gimmell tows a 23,000 pound truck Photo courtesy of Jennifer Gimmell

Powerlifting physicist pulls 11-ton truck

Jennifer Gimmell's coworkers didn't believe she competitively pumped iron. But as the evidence piled up—including a photo of her pulling a 23,000 pound truck—her fellow physicists had to concede: The strong force had nothing on Gimmell.

“They'll ask me the kinds of numbers that I have for my lifts,” she says,” and that's when it starts to hit them that I'm not just making this stuff up.”

The University of Rochester graduate student works at CDF, the Collider Detector at Fermilab. She squats 360 pounds, bench presses 200 pounds, and deadlifts 320 pounds.

The 5-foot-7-inch athlete is often dwarfed by other competitors, but that didn't stop her from taking first place in the Align Life Strongman competition last fall and second place in the American Powerlifting Federation's Chicago Summer Bash 5 in June.

Gimmell played softball and rugby in school, but never considered powerlifting until 2006, when fellow physicist Dan McCarron invited her to lift weights in the Fermilab gym.

“We started training together, and I realized I was able to do heavier weights than other people and make quicker strength gains,” Gimmell says.

The grueling three-hour workouts help balance the mental workout of studying the heaviest subatomic particle, the top quark, at CDF.

“It's a huge stress relief. I'm physically exhausted, so I can fall asleep at night without my mind speeding around work remaining in my thesis,” Gimmell says. She adds that if you ask around, you'll probably find a lot of physicists bicycle or run marathons for the same reason.

Jennifer Lee Johnson