Chaillet’s Gym Powerlifting Valhalla

Chaillet’s Gym, Thursday, May 4^th, 1987

Marshall deadlifting – Pat & Joe Watch

I was in the habit of bringing my Nikon with me to training sessions. I used an extremely fast 35mm lens and because the light was so good in Mark’s second floor gym, I was able to get clean shots without using a flash. In this picture, the main deadlift platform and main squat rack are shown. The bright afternoon sunlight dapples the yellow wall behind the squat rack and, because its deadlift day, not squat day, between sets the deadlifters drape their lifting belts over the barbell sitting on the squat rack.

On this particular day, I was deadlifting with Pat (who bore an amazing resemblance to Bluto,) Joe and Marshall. We were deadlifting with Mark and Elliot, not pictured, on the main deadlift platform. Mark is likely off on a phone call with his gigantic “portable phone” with the three-foot antenna. That, or dealing with a customer. Marshall is pulling a warm-up set with 565 on his way to 700. Marshall was a (raw) 520 pound bencher and a 785-pound squatter weighing 220. Pat and Joe were both in the 700 pound deadlift club. Joe had recently taken 2^nd place at the APF Junior Nationals in the 198 pound class with a 700 pound squat, a 700 pound deadlift and a 500 pound bench press.

This photo shows a portion of Mark’s innovative deadlift platform. Mark’s gym was on the second floor atop a commercial business. Neither he nor his gym members were allowed to drop deadlifts. A deadlift dropped upstairs sounded like a hand grenade going off downstairs. Mark and his dad Buck came up with an ingenious solution for noise free, impact-free deadlifting: they lay six small, used VW auto tires flat on the floor. Atop the tires, they laid two plywood sheets that sandwiched a latticework of 2x4s. Note the well-engineer lip on the forward edge of the platform. This kept a loaded wayward barbell from falling off the front edge of the platform and dropping a full foot onto the floor.

You would think this arrangement would be unstable, like standing on a waterbed, yet this configuration proved to be the perfect deadlift platform: level as a billiard table, it was an extremely stable giant shock absorber. Those six tires easily absorbed any downward energy, diffusing and negating the downward impact of a dropped deadlift with 800 + pounds. Periodically, a deadlift nearing lockout would slip out of the lifter’s grip and crash down onto the tire platform. While the impact of a dropped 700-pound deadlift would create a sonic boom, (noise would occur) it was a non-event as far as the downstairs tenants were concerned.

Back in those ancient days of yore, no one dropped deadlifts, and we were the stronger for it. Nowadays it is common and accepted practice to drop a deadlift. If you purposefully dropped a set of 5 reps with 405 at Chaillet’s, you would get your ass beat. If you purposefully dropped deadlifts in Cassidy’s basement or Maryland Athletic Club, you would get ejected immediately. Somewhere along the way dropping deadlifts became common and accepted practice.

Powerlifters do not throw away the strength-infusing/muscle-building attributes of a squat negative or a bench press negative – yet they purposefully throw away the strength-infusing/muscle-building attributes of the deadlift negative. How absurd!

One Thursday I counted fourteen guys, all locals, men that had deadlifted 700 pounds or more. They were working out simultaneously, deadlifting at three stations in this same room: Mark, brother Ray, Joe, Marshall, Pat, Graham B., Bobby M., Baltimore Jeff, Frank H, me, Don Mills, Joe Povinale, Kirk, and Mark Dimiduk. Plus, we always had out-of-town visiting lifters training with us. Bob Brandon from Richmond was a regular for years, trekking three hours each way. Bob had been in prison for manslaughter for ten years and had a 900 pound squat and a 550 bench press, this as a 5-8 275 pound lifter. He was built like a strongbox and spoke the King’s English, very well read, prison educated. 

I photographed Mark deadlifting 880 pounds (weighing 270) in one of our sessions, this done with room to spare and done on the elevated deadlift platform. I posted photos of his 880 pull in my book, the Purposeful Primitive, in the chapter on Mark.

Monday was squat day at Chaillet’s. The main action, the heaviest squatting, took place on the power rack shown in the photo, the rack with the belts hanging off the barbell loaded to 135. Chaillet squatted a below parallel 1,000 on those racks, I know it was deep because I gave him the “UP!” call. I squatted 845. Dimiduk doubled 825 weighing 240. Don Mills became the greatest master’s lifter in the world squatting in those same power racks.

There was a spacious airiness to this facility. It was sunlight and bright. Most of us had crawled out of dank, moldy, cold basement gyms and unheated garage gyms. Mark’s gym was a gilded sunlit power palace that we took for granted and thought would go on forever…  

Chaillet’s Gym, Monday at 4:30,  1988 

Mark Chaillet’s gym was powerlifting Valhala. The spacious facility was located on the second floor over an auto parts store. The gym was clean, well run and fantastically lit, with floor to ceiling windows in the lifting area. For a glorious period of time in the 1980s, Chaillet’s was, deservedly, a powerlifting magnet and a facility that created national and world champions and world record holders on a regularly reoccurring basis.

A really good hardcore resistance training facility has many of the same characteristics as a really good BBQ emporium. Both are really, really good at one thing: smoking meat or getting incredibly strong (which in turn creates men that are massively muscled.) BBQ shacks and hardcore training facilities have a singularity of purpose that is echoed in Hugh Cassidy’s admonishment to “do fewer things better.” At Chaillet’s gym men gathered to one simple thing: get better at the three powerlifts. Do so, and as an unexpected side benefit, become a muscled-up monster. Chaillet’s was unquestionably one of the premier power training facilities on the face of the planet.

Graham B is side spotting on Kirk’s right, Graham was a 700 pound deadlifter weighing a thin 220 pounds. Behind him is Silent John, the man you wanted back-spotting you during a limit attempt (and the first man I knew with sleeve tattoos.) Visible under Kirk’s left arm, in the grey sweatpants, is GT, an 840-pound squatter, 500-pound bencher (at 198) and successful professional criminal.

Spotting on Kirk’s left, with his face obscured by the plates, is my training partner RE, an incredible dude with an incredible story. He ended up locked up in jail for a long time. On the far right of the photo, in red sweats and the bald head, is then 27 year old Joe Ferry, a 700 pound squat and deadlifter with a 500 pound bench press at 198 pounds.

What a crew! The gym members had a disproportionally high number of professional cops and professional criminals.

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