On a foggy day in the summer of 1979, Jan Todd pulled on a navy tracksuit and combed her long blond hair, letting it hang loose down her back.
She had flown to Scotland to attempt to lift a massive set of boulders known as the Dinnie Stones, each outfitted with an iron ring. In the 120 years since a Scottish strongman famously hoisted the stones, thousands had tried and failed the test of strength. Of the 11 who had succeeded, all were men. She was 5-foot-7 and 195 pounds; the stones together weighed 733 pounds.
As she approached the boulders outside a 240-year-old inn, a crowd gathered. Finding the right stance was challenging, but eventually she straddled the rocks, adjusted her hand straps for a better grip, clasped the rings and pulled. One creaked off the ground but the other held firm. She felt her face flush.
Then she reminded herself why she wanted to lift them: to show herself, and the world, that a woman could. She bent her knees, took a deep breath and yanked one boulder off the ground, then the other.
The feat wouldn’t be replicated by another woman until 2018. In the ensuing decades, Jan Todd went on to shatter powerlifting records, earn a Ph.D. devoted to the history of strength and exercise, create a doctoral program, launch an academic journal and open the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center, a sprawling museum, library and archive dedicated to the pursuit of physical potential.
Collectively, through relentless force of will, she helped to transform strength training from a fringe activity into the cornerstone of healthy living that it is today, particularly among women.
“I do think that I have helped make it possible for more women to understand that it is actually OK to be strong, it’s OK to have muscles,” Dr. Todd, now 73, said while giving me a tour of her museum on the fifth floor of the University of Texas at Austin football stadium.
She had greeted me in the museum’s lobby alongside a 10-and-a-half-foot replica of the ancient statue of Farnese Hercules, with its rippled abs and huge quadriceps. Wearing a billowy floral blouse and large hexagonal glasses, Dr. Todd walked with a pronounced limp and gave the impression of a proud den mother.
She guided me through the museum’s galleries and backrooms, all shrines to strength. The rooms were filled with artifacts of strongmen and strongwomen throughout history, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Josephine Blatt, a turn-of-the-century weight lifter known as Minerva. The center holds more than 40,000 books, and in a back corner there’s a chunky early 20th-century dumbbell (“almost unliftable,” Dr. Todd said) next to a Shake Weight.
“I need to save them,” she said of the artifacts around her. If not, she added, “maybe nobody else will.”
Once a sideshow oddity, weight lifting has seen a surge in popularity since the late 1980s, with strength training now more popular than cardio, according to some reports. Everyone today, from pregnant women to older adults with arthritic knees, is encouraged to build muscle, thanks in part to people like Dr. Todd and her students.
“Jan Todd is a legend in the world of strength,” wrote Mr. Schwarzenegger, who has known and collaborated with her for decades, in an email. “She’s a pioneer who led the way for strongwomen all over the world. She’s studied it more than anyone I know, and she’s also lived it.”
Once known as “the world’s strongest woman,” Dr. Todd once bent bottle caps with her fingers, lifted her Ford Fiesta for fun and drove nails through wooden boards with her palms. But greater feats were still to come.
Learning to flex
Growing up in Western Pennsylvania, Dr. Todd, then Janice Suffolk, wasn’t encouraged to flex her muscles, physically or intellectually. Her family was poor, without an indoor bathroom for a while, and her father, a steel mill worker, didn’t see the point in educating women. And neither was he a fan of girls playing sports.
Janice was always bigger than her friends, wider and sturdier, “like a larger species of the same animal,” she told me. More like a “Clydesdale than a thoroughbred,” she said.
After her parents divorced, her mother encouraged Janice to join the high school swim team, but she felt ashamed when she couldn’t fit into the required swimsuit. “I didn’t have any appreciation yet that the bigness of my body,” she said, would “make it possible for me to be who I became.”
As a college student at Mercer University in Macon, Ga., she met Terry Todd, a 6-foot-2 national powerlifting champion and a professor there. Terry fell in love with Jan when he saw her flip a massive log at a barbecue.
“She was a natural force. Mount Rushmore,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1977. “There was something about the way she stepped up to that log and lifted it,” he later told People. “No giggling, no false modesty.” According to family lore, when he told his grandmother about Jan, he opened with: “You know, she is perfectly leveraged for the squat.”
They married and Terry encouraged her to start weight lifting and then powerlifting. She was a natural. One day at the grocery store, she picked up a giant watermelon and was surprised to discover that it felt light. She began to see her strength, even her size, as an asset.
“If the watermelon is not heavy, the dog food bag is not heavy and your grocery bags aren’t heavy,” she said, “you begin to realize that so many things in your life are easier.”
Still, she had few role models for what a physically strong woman could look like. After all, even Wonder Woman’s muscles were relatively small.
Around this time, Terry told her about a storied early-20th-century strongwoman, Katie Sandwina, also known as Lady Hercules. A star of the Barnum and Bailey circus, she was nearly six feet tall, more than 200 pounds and billed as the world’s strongest and most beautiful woman. Jan was captivated. It was a whole new model of womanhood.
She began looking into the histories of other strongwomen, with names like Vulcana, Athleta, and “Pudgy.” She found that understanding the people who came before helped her embrace her own power. “It was reassuring to me,” she said.
In the mid-1970s, the couple moved to a farm in Nova Scotia, where Jan taught high school English by day and trained by night. She kept a set of barbells in the back of her classroom.
Throughout this time, Dr. Todd set more than 60 national and world records and was profiled by Sports Illustrated in 1977. Coaches around the country began tearing out the article and posting it in girls’ locker rooms as inspiration. Johnny Carson invited her onto “The Tonight Show,” where she deadlifted 415 pounds for an audience of 14 million viewers.
The pursuit of power
In the early 1980s, Jan and Terry moved to Austin, and Jan got a job at the University of Texas teaching weight lifting and coaching the school’s powerlifting teams. She realized that few people studied the history of sports, let alone strength training, and that most exercise physiologists focused on aerobic activities, like running and cycling.
So she started a Ph.D. in American studies, crafting her coursework around the history of muscle and exercise, particularly among women, and became an outspoken promoter of strength. It wasn’t easy. Around the department, she often felt eyes on her biceps. It seemed you could be a meathead or an egghead, but you couldn’t be both. Her degree was delayed more than a year when the department chair decided that, despite her excellent grades, her work in the women’s studies wasn’t serious enough.
“I don’t think I could ever be anybody for him other than the weight lifting lady,” she said.
She kept pushing. She co-wrote the first scientific guidelines on strength training for women, helping to dispel fears about its potential danger to women’s bodies.
She and Terry created the first academic journal dedicated to the history of strength sports and exercise — Iron Game History — in 1990. It gave strength scholars a place to publish, and Dr. Todd still edits the journal today. In it, she has documented dozens of strongwomen lost to history — women who hoisted cannons, twirled their husbands like a rifle or lifted two men with one arm.
Longtime colleagues say Dr. Todd is unrelenting, building up the people around her and lifting her field and students — many who have become leading exercise scientists, health researchers and historians.
“Jan is a really good — I won’t call it a pusher, I’ll call it a masher,” said Kyle Martin, a longtime colleague and curator of her museum. She is constantly mashing together people, sources and ideas, he said.
Pumping the iron game
Not long after they moved to Texas, Jan and Terry started trying to have children. Getting pregnant was taking longer than Dr. Todd had hoped, and in her darker moments, she wondered if the fearmongers who said lifting could wreck a woman’s fertility were right.
Then at 36, not long after learning that her degree would be delayed, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and was told she had less than a 25 percent chance of survival. Driving back from a doctor’s appointment, Terry turned to her and asked: “When have you not been in the top 25 percent of anything?”
What followed was surgery and treatments and moments when she struggled to get out of bed (though she kept lifting). Throughout the ordeal, she called on the same drive she used as an athlete. She eventually beat the cancer, but she would never be able to have children.
So she got back to work.
For years, Jan and Terry had filled rooms of their home with strength memorabilia and artifacts they had collected, convinced that they might someday be of interest to scholars. The Todds knew that researchers depend on historical objects, photographs and texts. The couple threw their energy into creating a museum.
“I’m not going to have children,” she remembers thinking at the time. “If there is a legacy for me or for Terry, for both of us hopefully, it’s going to be this place.”
In 2008, after decades of petitioning, lobbying and fund-raising, they opened the Stark Center in a 27,500-square-foot space inside the stadium. There are posters of Katie Sandwina, the circus strongwoman, photos of the Muscle Beach star Pudgy Stockton (one of Dr. Todd’s mentors) and of Mr. Schwarzenegger posing on the cover of Iron Man magazine.
There’s also the four decade backlist of Shape magazine, the first dedicated to women’s fitness. “I remember clearly seeing the very first volume,” she said while thumbing though a copy. The cover featured Miss Universe in a purple catsuit promising to help readers “bodysculpt.” “That was a big thing.”
Strong like Jan
In 2018, Terry died. Then, five years ago, on her 68th birthday, Dr. Todd went for an evening drive with friends in their off-road vehicle. Suddenly, a couple wild boars darted in front of them. Her friend slammed the brakes and the vehicle skidded into a ditch, then flipped. Dr. Todd, a woman who had lifted countless cars, was trapped under one for more than an hour.
The accident shattered her ribs, wrist, ankle bones and a hip but didn’t damage any organs. Doctors told her that her muscles might have protected her from more serious injury, even saving her life.
She moves differently since the accident — “like a drunken penguin,” she told me, as she sipped a Diet Coke from a large tumbler with the words “DON’T WEAKEN.” We sat in lounge chairs on her back patio, as her two 150-pound bull mastiffs played by her feet. Nowadays she lifts less, likes to garden and travels to Scotland most summers to watch others try to lift the Dinnie Stones.
Dr. Todd is also finally getting wider attention for her academic work, which is featured in two new books about the science and history of weight lifting. In them she is portrayed as an almost mythic figure.
“Nobody has integrated the greatest powers of muscle and the greatest powers of mind in athletics and academics as seamlessly as she has,” said Michael Joseph Gross, author of “Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives.”
Near the end of our interviews, Dr. Todd brought me into her garage, which is bursting with overflow from the Stark Center; shelves of artifacts and keepsakes from her own life and the history of strength training. She opened boxes at random to show me medals, log books, posters, hundreds of photos and an archive documenting decades of Dinnie Stone lifts.
We eventually arrived at her rack of weights, unceremoniously squeezed into a back corner. She hasn’t used them much since her accident, she said. She greeted them quietly, like a relic from her own history. But she seemed OK with this.
“Even as broken down as I am,” she said, “I can still pick up the 50-pound bag of dog food and pour it in the bowl and not have to worry too much about that. And I can carry in my firewood.”
And she can still bend bottle caps with her bare hands.
Danielle Friedman is a journalist in New York and the author of “Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World.”
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