At six feet eight and four hundred and thirty pounds, Brian Shaw competes in events such as car lifts and the Manhood Stones. Illustration by Barry Blitt

The giant of Fort Lupton was born, like a cowbird’s chick, to parents of ordinary size. His father, Jay Shaw, a lineman for a local power company, was six feet tall; his mother, Bonnie, was an inch or so shorter. At the age of three months, Brian weighed seventeen pounds. At two years, he could grab his Sit ’n Spin and toss it nearly across the room. In photographs of his grade-school classes, he always looked out of place, his grinning, elephant-eared face floating like a parade balloon above the other kids in line. They used to pile on his back during recess, his mother told me—not because they didn’t like him but because they wanted to see how many of them he could carry. “I just think Brian has been blessed,” she said. “He has been blessed with size.”

Fort Lupton is a city of eight thousand on the dry plains north of Denver. In a bigger place, Shaw might have been corralled into peewee football at eight or nine, and found his way among other oversized boys. But the local teams were lousy and, aside from a few Punt, Pass & Kick contests—which he won with discouraging ease—Shaw stuck to basketball. By seventh grade, he was six feet tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds. When he went in for a dunk on his hoop at home, he snapped off the pole, leaving a jagged stump in the driveway. By his late teens, his bulk had become a menace. One player knocked himself out running into Shaw’s chest; another met with his elbow coming down with a rebound, and was carried off with a broken nose and shattered facial bones. “It was bad,” Shaw told me. “One guy, we dove for a ball together, and I literally broke his back. It wasn’t that I was a dirty player. I wasn’t even trying to do it hard.”

Like other very large men, Shaw has a surprisingly sweet nature. His voice is higher and smaller than you’d expect, and he tends to inflect it with question marks. His face has the bulbous charm of a potato carving. “He’s almost overly friendly,” Terry Todd, a former champion weight lifter and an instructor at the University of Texas, told me. “It’s like he thinks that if he’s not you’ll be frightened of him and run away.” At six feet eight and four hundred and thirty pounds, Shaw has such a massive build that most men don’t bother trying to measure up. His torso is three feet wide at the shoulders; his biceps are nearly two feet around. His neck is thicker than other men’s thighs. “I know I’m big,” he told me. “I’ve been big my whole life. I’ve never had to prove how tough I am.”

In the summer of 2005, when Shaw was twenty-three, he went to Las Vegas for a strength-and-conditioning convention. He was feeling a little adrift. He had a degree in wellness management from Black Hills State University, in South Dakota, and was due to start a master’s program at Arizona State that fall. But after moving to Tempe, a few weeks earlier, and working out with the football team, he was beginning to have second thoughts. “This was a big Division I, Pac-10 school, but I was a little surprised, to be honest,” he told me. “I was so much stronger than all of them.” One day at the convention, Shaw came upon a booth run by Sorinex, a company that has designed weight-lifting systems for the Denver Broncos and other football programs. The founder, Richard Sorin, liked to collect equipment used by old-time strongmen and had set out a few items for passersby to try. There were some kettle bells lying around, like cannonballs with handles attached, and a clumsy-looking thing called a Thomas Inch dumbbell.

Inch was an early-twentieth-century British strongman famous for his grip. His dumbbell, made of cast iron, weighed a hundred and seventy-two pounds and had a handle as thick as a tin can, difficult to grasp. In his stage shows, Inch would offer a prize of more than twenty thousand dollars in today’s currency to anyone who could lift the dumbbell off the floor with one hand. For more than fifty years, no one but Inch managed it, and only a few dozen have done so in the half century since. “A thousand people will try to lift it in a weekend, and a thousand won’t lift it,” Sorin told me. “A lot of strong people have left with their tails between their legs.” It came as something of a shock, therefore, to see Shaw reach over and pick up the dumbbell as if it were a paperweight. “He was just standing there with a blank look on his face,” Sorin said. “It was, like, What’s so very hard about this?”

When Shaw set down the dumbbell and walked away, Sorin ran over to find him in the crowd. “His eyes were huge,” Shaw recalls. “He said, ‘Can you do that again?’ And I said, ‘Of course I can.’ So he took a picture and sent it to me afterward.” Sorin went on to tell Shaw about the modern strongman circuit—an extreme sport, based on the kinds of feat performed by men like Inch, which had a growing following worldwide. “He said that my kind of strength was unbelievable. It was a one in a million. If I didn’t do something with my abilities, I was stupid. That was pretty cool.”

Three months later, Shaw won his first strongman event. Within a year, he had turned pro. He has since deadlifted more than a thousand pounds and pressed a nearly quarter-ton log above his head. He has harnessed himself to fire engines, Mack trucks, and a Lockheed C-130 transport plane and dragged them hundreds of yards. In 2011, he became the only man ever to win the sport’s two premier competitions in the same year. He has become, by some measures, the strongest man in history.

Shaw does his training in a storage facility in the town of Frederick, about fifteen minutes from his home town. His gym is behind the last garage door to the right, in a row of nearly identical bays. He leaves it open most of the year, framing a view of the snowcapped Front Range, to the west. Inside, the equipment has the same cartoonish scale as his body. One corner is given over to a set of giant concrete balls, known as Manhood Stones. Across the room, a flat steel frame leans against the wall, a pair of handles welded to one end. It’s designed to have a vehicle parked on top of it and hoisted up like a wheelbarrow. (Shaw has lifted an S.U.V eleven times in seventy-five seconds.) Next to it sit piles of enormous tires, which will be threaded onto a pipe for the Hummer Tire Dead Lift.

Strongman events tend to be exaggerated versions of everyday tasks: heaving logs, carrying rocks, pushing carts. Awkwardness and unpredictability are part of the challenge. When I visited, Shaw was coaching his lifting buddies in the Super Yoke and the Duck Walk. The former harks back to the ancient strongman tradition of carrying a cow across your shoulders. (In the sixth century B.C., Milo of Croton, the greatest of Greek strongmen, is said to have lugged a four-year-old heifer the length of the Olympic arena.) The cow, in this case, was in the form of a steel frame loaded with weights, which the men took turns shouldering around the gym. The Duck Walk was something that a blacksmith might do. It involved lifting an anvil-like weight of around three hundred pounds between your legs and waddling down a path with it as fast as possible.