Pod Insights 99% Invisible Perfectly Leveraged for the Squat About this episode Jan Todd was considered by many to be the strongest woman in the world back in the 1970s. Then she became a historian, and uncovered a lost generation of strong women who came before her.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:07 Roman Mars? This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.
1:12 Roman Mars? On a damp evening in the summer of 1979, a woman named Jan Todd stood outside an old inn in northeast Scotland. In front of her were two enormous granite stones. They were both about knee height. Each one had an iron ring attached to it, like a little handle. And Jan had flown from the US to Scotland to grab those handles and try to lift the stones off the ground.
1:37 Speaker 01 It's like it's Scotland and it's slippery and it's moist. And so I tried twice. I'm frustrated and it's getting dark.
1:47 Speaker 02 These stones were legendary in the world of weightlifting.
1:51 Roman Mars? That's 99PI senior editor, Delaney Hall.
1:54 Speaker 02 Together, they weigh more than 700 pounds, and they've become known as the Denny stones, after Donald Denny, one of the first men known to have picked them up. They're part of a Scottish tradition appropriately named manhood stones, in which big burly dudes try to hoist up a boulder to, well, prove their manhood.
2:16 Roman Mars? For many decades, only a handful of men had managed to lift the Denny stones. No woman had ever done it. Jan had recently been declared the strongest woman in the world by Sports Illustrated, and Jan's visit to Scotland was a chance to prove just how strong she really was.
2:35 Speaker 02 That soggy evening, Jan was able to lift the smaller stone, weighing a mere 318 pounds, a few inches.
2:43 Speaker 01 But the big one, I can't quite get off the ground. And for the, to count, you've got to get them both off. Not for a long time, let's be honest. And the Scots have an expression, you need to have the wind beneath the stones. So as long as you get the wind beneath the stones, you're good.
3:01 Roman Mars? A bunch of guys from the nearby pub had come out to witness Jan's attempts, and she was getting flustered. She told her husband that she needed a break.
3:10 Speaker 01 I said, I just need to walk away for a minute because it's like become a thing.
3:13 Speaker 02 The reality was that Jan's whole trip to Scotland had become a thing. She was there with two men, her husband and a friend, who were both weightlifters themselves. And even though Jan was the one there to lift the stones, the guys seemed to be getting all the attention. The night before, for example, they were all at a reception supposedly in Jan's honor, hosted by a local mayor. The mayor had gifts for the men, but not for Jan.
3:41 Speaker 01 Whiskey is drunk. I'm not offered any Scotch, unlike the guys. I didn't really want to like make a scene, but it bugged me, of course. I might've used stronger language if we weren't on the air.
3:52 Speaker 02 In other words, Jan was [bleep] pissed. And that anger was bubbling under the surface as she tried and failed to lift the stones outside the pub. She walked away to collect herself, and her husband followed to give her the pep talk she didn't realize she needed.
4:10 Speaker 01 He said, okay, he said, I want you to do this one for the whiskey man, which is what he called him, the whiskey man.
4:17 Speaker 02 With that, Jan walked back over to the Denny stones.
4:21 Speaker 01 Let's see if I can do this one to show the whiskey man what I could do.
4:25 Speaker 02 She straddled the two rocks and grabbed the iron ring at the top of each one. And then she lifted them both.
4:32 Speaker 01 And so then it came up.
4:34 Speaker 03 You did it.
4:35 Speaker 01 I did it.
4:35 Speaker 03 The wind.
4:36 Speaker 01 I put the wind beneath the stones. And then nobody, no other woman did it for like 39 years.
4:45 Roman Mars? Jan Todd's life involved a lot of firsts. She was the first woman to lift the Denny stones. In competitive powerlifting, she was the first woman to total 1,000 pounds in the combined squat, bench press, and deadlift. But before Jan came along, women's powerlifting wasn't even a thing. There were no competitions, no divisions, and no rulebook. So Jan helped write those rules and helped organize those first competitions. She became kind of a mother figure to women powerlifters.
5:15 Speaker 02 For many years, as she was building the sport for women, Jan thought of herself as an anomaly or an outlier. After all, she was operating in the largely male world of weightlifting. And she'd grown up absorbing the idea that there was something strange, and maybe even dangerous, about a woman being strong.
5:35 Speaker 01 Like my grandmother used to caution me about running too fast. You know, there were all kinds of sort of myths of things about what would happen to a woman if she built too much muscle, things like that. And so there was a lot of, I don't know, a lot of garbage to kind of work through intellectually to sort of feel like it was okay to have muscles.
5:56 Speaker 02 Jan wanted to know where all that garbage came from. Like, who decided it was a problem for women to have muscles? And when? And why did everyone seem so sure about it? And eventually, after paving the way for a generation of women weightlifters that followed her, she would take on those questions and figure them out, and in the process rewrite the history of women and strength.
6:24 Roman Mars? Since Hercules strangled a lion with his bare hands, strength has always been a kind of currency.
6:30 Speaker 04 It signifies something, and of course, it's so much about men.
6:34 Speaker 02 This is Bonny Tsui. She wrote a book called On Muscle, about what muscle is and why it matters. And she says the Denny stones aren't unique. There are lots of places in the world where men lift big stones to prove themselves, like in Iceland, the Basque Country, Bavaria, and Japan.
6:53 Speaker 04 It's like, I am a man if I have picked up this big boulder over my head in front of everyone, and then I get this land and my wife. Or I get to lead this regiment into battle or whatever.
7:07 Speaker 02 Are these all real? These are real examples.
7:09 Speaker 04 These are all real. I am not making these up.
7:14 Roman Mars? Strength conferred status to men who had it. And in America, in the late 1800s, the advice generally aimed at women said the opposite, that women's bodies were fragile and had to be guarded. In fact, if women were strong, it generated a lot of unease. The natural order was out of whack.
7:32 Speaker 04 That is disruption, and that is like a discomfort that really extends across all spheres of life.
7:41 Speaker 02 In the 1890s, for example, a lot of doctors believed that the body ran on a fixed supply of energy. Because women needed a lot of energy to carry babies and raise children, people worried about them spending too much time exercising.
7:56 Speaker 04 There's a lot of pseudoscience governing women's bodies around sports and other physical activity because there was a lot of panic over women, you know, not being able to fulfill their reproductive obligations, like in society and domestic spheres.
8:13 Roman Mars? This basic idea bounced around for decades. People argued that even studying would deprive women's reproductive organs of necessary energy, or that getting involved in the rough and tumble world of politics would do the same, ultimately driving women to hysteria.
8:30 Speaker 02 Although it's worth saying that the women those doctors had in mind were generally a specific type of woman. White, well off, and ones who weren't expected to work. There was a whole different set of gross pseudoscientific assumptions about black women, for example, who'd been doing hard labor for generations and who were often described as naturally tireless and incapable of pain. White women were the ones described as fragile.
9:01 Roman Mars? But underneath these ideas, there was a bigger idea at work, a connection between physical strength and mental and emotional strength.
9:09 Speaker 04 You know, you think about the women's suffrage movement in America. There were suffragists who talked about how physical health and exercise was essential for women to gain freedom, like gain the right to vote.
9:29 Roman Mars? By the middle of the 20th century, as women gained access to the vote and a toehold in public life, the anxiety around women and exercise didn't really stop, but it took on a different form. For so long, women had been told to be careful about exerting themselves. But now, they started receiving a different message. If you don't exercise, you might become unattractive.
9:52 Speaker 02 Starting in the 1930s and 40s, fitness pioneers like Jack Lalanne began talking about the importance of diet and regular exercise. Lalanne opened one of the first modern public health clubs in the country, in Oakland, California. And he trained not just men, but women, older people, and people with disabilities. He actually had women lifting weights at a time when the common wisdom was that it would make them look masculine. He was way ahead of his time in many ways. But his ideas weren't always popular in the wider culture. And so, especially when it came to television, Lalanne sometimes adjusted
10:34 Speaker 02 his pitch. In the early 50s, he launched one of the first fitness programs on TV, aimed squarely at women who would be home during the day with their kids.
10:45 Speaker 05 Hey, who do I see there? My boys and girls, my little helpers, kiddies. Wherever mother is, you go run and get her. And you tell mother, you say, "Mother, it's Monday, and Jack Lalanne is waiting. Go get her. Come on."
10:55 Speaker 02 In his signature belted jumpsuit, Lalanne would demonstrate light movements that would help a woman stay trim and avoid the mortal embarrassment of gaining weight. In one episode, Jack described a letter he received from one of his followers.
11:11 Speaker 05 And this letter went something like this. It said, "Dear Jack, I'm at the end of the rope. I have let my body get so out of condition, I'm so many pounds overweight, that my husband wants to divorce me. He's so ashamed of me. My children," this lady I'm talking about had three children, "said, "My children, they don't seem to have any love and respect for me. They won't bring their friends over to the house because they're so ashamed of me. And my friends, they all have lost respect to me." She said, "I've lost my husband's respect."
11:40 Roman Mars? Even though fitness culture was growing, and even though women were now part of the audience, movement and exercise were pitched in service of looking good.
11:50 Speaker 02 This is the world that Jan Todd was born into in 1952, just a year after Jack Lalanne's fitness show started broadcasting in San Francisco. Jan's family was from a steel town outside of Pittsburgh. Her dad was a steel worker, and her mom was a nurse. And the family moved a lot for her dad's work. Jan lived in Illinois, and Texas, and Florida. And she grew up making her own clothes and working various after-school jobs. Money was tight.
12:21 Speaker 01 I remember my mom sitting at the kitchen table at night saying, "Okay, we're gonna be okay. But I have $40 till my next paycheck." And that's what we had.
12:32 Speaker 02 Jan said she felt self-conscious about her body as she was growing up. She was bigger and sturdier than many girls her age. And she's described herself as sometimes feeling like a Clydesdale horse, while many of her peers were more like delicate thoroughbreds. She was a naturally gifted athlete, but there weren't many outlets for her talents.
12:53 Speaker 01 I was, quote, "the fastest girl in my school for like the 50-yard dash. Not world class, but you know, but with no training and being sort of bigger as I was, because I was never a tiny person. But nobody said, "Oh, we should try to find somebody to coach you for track and field," or something like that. So it just didn't happen.
13:12 Speaker 02 At home, Jan got the message from her dad that there wasn't much reason for women to play sports, or even get an education.
13:20 Speaker 01 My dad was a fairly conservative guy about what women should do.
13:25 Speaker 02 When she was in sixth grade, Jan recalled how some of the other girls in her class were taking gymnastics and ballet, and how she brought up the idea of lessons to her dad.
13:35 Speaker 01 And I was thinking it would be a way to kind of maybe make a few friends. And he actually said, "No," he didn't want to do that, because he actually thought that ballerinas had too much muscle in their legs.
13:47 Speaker 02 Wow.
13:47 Speaker 01 Wow.
13:48 Speaker 02 Even ballerinas?
13:49 Speaker 01 Even ballerinas. Not soft enough for my dad. Never forgot that one.
13:54 Speaker 02 Instead, Jan pursued other activities. She edited the school newspaper, got good grades, and eventually enrolled at Mercer University, a small Baptist college in Georgia. She thought she might eventually become a lawyer or a journalist. But then, in her first year of college, she was sitting in a lecture hall when someone walked in who would change the trajectory of her life. And in turn, the whole field of women's weightlifting.
14:23 Speaker 01 So, the first time I remember Terry Todd was when he came in to give the special lecture for that week, which was based on the reading of Huckleberry Finn.
14:36 Speaker 02 Terry Todd was a professor at Mercer, teaching in the education department. He also happened to be a retired national powerlifting champion. Men had been training with barbells for about a century, but competitive powerlifting was only about five years old. The sport focused on three lifts: the squat, the bench press, and the deadlift. It all comes down to how much weight you can move in those three lifts, and it requires a kind of awesome physicality. For a few years there, Terry had been one of the strongest men in the country.
15:10 Speaker 01 And he is the first person I've ever seen who really has lifted weights. His shoulders look like they're about this wide. He has short sleeves on, so you can see the big muscles in his arms. And I had never seen anybody who looked like him.
15:24 Speaker 02 Was it physically, like, appealing to you, or was it kind of off-putting, or what? Do you remember what you thought?
15:30 Speaker 01 I just remember, he looked, you know, somewhat like a Superman from the comic books. I used to read a lot of Superman. Liked guys with muscles, I think, even before I knew. I had never seen a bodybuilding magazine yet, or any of that. But he looked good.
15:45 Speaker 02 Eventually, Jan and Terry ended up playing on an intramural softball team together. And at the end of the season, Terry hosted a barbecue at his house in the Georgia countryside. Because he was a former weightlifter, and because he was interested in the history of strength training, Terry started telling his students about the caber toss, an event in the Scottish Highland Games, where you lift and then throw a massive wooden pole so that it flips end over end. He just happened to have cut down some pine trees on his property, and he decided to demonstrate with one of the trunks.
16:21 Speaker 01 So he's showing off and demonstrating this. Some of the guys are all trying it. And then, I don't know why, but somebody talked to me and said, "You should try that." When I tried it, I flipped it, and the guys had not. That sparked Terry's interest. It surprised him.
16:38 Speaker 02 Did he say anything to you? Was there a moment or anything?
16:41 Speaker 01 He shamed the boys. You know, he wanted to talk about, "The girl can do it, but why can't the boy?" You know, it was sort of some of that badgering stuff that went on, which I loved, of course.
16:52 Speaker 02 This was the beginning of something between Terry and Jan. At the time, Terry was married. He was also quite a bit older than Jan, and he was a professor, and she was a student. But what can I say? It was the 1970s. And with time, a funny kind of strength-based flirtation began between the two of them. Jan remembers one night, not long after she flipped a pine trunk end over end.
17:20 Speaker 01 We were out at his house, and the students had left. And he and I were sitting outside on the deck on the back porch. And he went in the kitchen, got a couple beers, and he had opened them. And when he came out, he had the caps in his hands. And so, he wanted to show me that he could, like, take the bottle cap and he could put it here, just like, "This is it." So he could put it between his thumb and his finger, and he could crush the cap, right?
17:43 Speaker 02 At the time they were doing this, bottle caps were made of steel, not aluminum. And the move is actually an old strong man's feet. It takes enormous grip strength to do it.
17:55 Speaker 01 And so he did that with it. And I was, like, impressed. And then he handed me the other one. He said, "Do you want to try it?" And I said, "Yeah." And I did it. First time I ever tried it, which shocked him.
18:09 Speaker 02 Terry eventually got divorced. And he and Jan got married in November of 1973, during her senior year of college. The culture was shifting around them. The year before, Congress had passed Title IX, which barred sex discrimination at any school taking federal money. Over the next decade, it would force schools to start funding girls' sports. And that same year, tennis player Billie Jean King had played Bobby Riggs in the so-called Battle of the Sexes.
18:43 Speaker 02 And the crowd loves it. And 90 million people tuned in to watch her win. It was becoming more acceptable for a woman to be strong and capable in the realm of sports.
18:54 Speaker 01 There's a lot of sort of interesting stuff going on. So did I grow up learning about feminism from my teachers in Plant City High School? Absolutely not. But by this time at Mercer University, we're talking about feminism and other kinds of isms a lot.
19:10 Speaker 02 That year, Jan decided to join Terry to take up weightlifting. She didn't do it for feminist reasons, and she didn't really see it as a political statement.
19:21 Speaker 01 You know, in reality, I married a guy who had been the national powerlifting and also national weightlifting champion. And so, you know, the thing that you do when you're in love and you're young is you go everywhere together, right? And so if he went to the gym, then I was like, well, maybe I should go to the gym with him.
19:37 Speaker 02 So Jan went to the gym because her husband went to the gym. But once she was there, she discovered essentially by accident that she was one of the strongest people in the room. She recalled one of her first visits to the Texas Athletic Club.
19:53 Speaker 01 Walking around, I realized there was a woman in there who was doing deadlifts.
19:57 Speaker 02 The woman was lifting 225 pounds.
20:01 Speaker 01 And so as we were talking, she said to me, you know, you could certainly try this if you want, if you want to work in, as we say, you want to work in. I said, yeah, I'll try it. And I could deadlift it the first time. I did it.
20:13 Speaker 02 You could deadlift 225 pounds, what she was lifting. You just bent over and did it.
20:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, but I could pull it easily.
20:20 Speaker 02 In the car on the way home, Terry couldn't let this go. He'd always been impressed by Jan's physical presence. Shortly after they started dating, he bragged about Jan to his family. He said she was, quote, "perfectly leveraged for the squat." And now he'd watched her pick up 225 pounds like it was a grocery bag. He thought with the right coaching, maybe his coaching, there was no telling where Jan might end up. By the time they got home, he'd landed on what might sound like a strange or overzealous idea. He thought she should try to get into the Guinness Book of World Records.
21:01 Speaker 01 And I thought, I'm really bored doing the light stuff that I've been doing when I just go to the gym on my own. Yeah, I said, that might be fun.
21:09 Speaker 02 That might be fun to set a world record.
21:12 Speaker 01 Well, you got to remember, there is no women's bodybuilding, no women's weightlifting, and no women's Olympic lifting in this era. So there's, this woman is the only person I've met that I even know about. And so for me, it was kind of like, oh, well, that would be kind of interesting. That'd be cool to be in the Guinness Book of World Records.
21:34 Roman Mars? Jan started training to try to break the world record in the deadlift. For the unfamiliar, the deadlift is the simplest event in competitive powerlifting. A loaded barbell sits on the floor, and you pick it up. Then you stand, knees locked and shoulders back, until a referee tells you to set it down.
21:52 Speaker 02 The standing record dated back to 1926, when a Frenchwoman had deadlifted 392 pounds. Nearly 50 years later, in May of 1975, Jan thought she was ready to lift more.
22:06 Roman Mars? Jan and Terry headed to a powerlifting meet in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the right referees would be present to judge her attempted record. She ended up lifting nearly 395 pounds, enough to make it into the record book.
22:21 Speaker 02 Over the next few years, Jan smashed one boundary after another. She became the first woman to deadlift over 400 pounds. Then she broke the 1,000-pound record for combined squat, deadlift, and bench press. Then she hit 1,100 pounds combined, and then 1,200 pounds. She lifted the Denny Stones. And maybe even more importantly, she helped write the first set of rules for women powerlifters. She advocated for there to be female divisions in the major competitions. She was almost single-handedly building the field for women.
22:55 Roman Mars? And she got a lot of attention for it. Weightlifting had always been part sport, part performance, and she was good at both sides of it. She was featured in Sports Illustrated, and she ended up on the Johnny Carson Show.
23:09 Speaker 06 Your hands outside.
23:10 Roman Mars? Like this.
23:11 Speaker 06 Like that.
23:12 Roman Mars? That's right. Instructing him on the finer points of deadlifting 415 pounds. Oh, boy.
23:16 Speaker 06 I don't think you're trying, Johnny.
23:18 Roman Mars? Oh, boy.
23:19 Speaker 06 I don't think.
23:20 Speaker 02 Oh, there's no way I could get it.
23:21 Speaker 06 Why don't we roll this up?
23:22 Speaker 02 But sometimes, all of this attention felt strange to her. Like, with all the professional male weightlifters around her lifting even heavier weights, why was she the one getting so much attention?
23:35 Speaker 01 It was for me intellectually, when I began to sort of think through the whole, what is it that we feel about women with muscles? Why are people concerned that I have muscles? I mean, my mother was quite convinced that my uterus would fall out, you know, because I would squat and then, you know, there'd be sort of like, it would be a prolapse, you know, or something. And it was like, you know, none of that's going to happen, but those were cautionary tales. So there was baggage there.
24:02 Speaker 02 Jan kept turning these questions over in the back of her mind. Everyone was treating her like the first woman, maybe the only woman, to have ever lifted heavy weights. But she couldn't quite believe that was true. Out of all the women who had ever lived, there must have been others like her, women who were more Clydesdale than thoroughbred, who possessed a predator natural strength. She had caught a few glimpses here and there of the women who'd come before her. There was the woman who held the deadlifting record before Jan broke it. Terry knew of a few others from long ago.
24:39 Roman Mars? But then, in the mid-1970s, something fateful happened that would change Jan's perspective on women and strength forever. An old circus strongman died, and he left behind a bunch of boxes stored away in his house. And inside them, there was a whole history that had been lost to time. We'll open them when we come back from the break. When your mental health is suffering, therapy can help. But sometimes, it's not the whole answer. Talkiatory gives you access to real psychiatric care with licensed clinicians who can diagnose and prescribe medication if it's right for you. It's a simple way to get effective treatment right from home.
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28:16 Roman Mars? In the late 70s, after spending years setting records and building a culture of weightlifting for women, Jan received a phone call that would launch her on a new trajectory.
28:25 Speaker 01 A man named Ottley Coulter, who was a friend of Terry's and had a big collection of materials, passed away.
28:31 Roman Mars? Ottley Coulter had performed in the 19 teens, lifting weights in the circus for a living. And then he spent the rest of his life saving materials related to his career. He collected correspondence, photographs, magazines published from the late 1800s onwards. Much of it focused on weightlifting and feats of strength.
28:50 Speaker 02 Terry had used the collection many years earlier, when he was writing his dissertation on the history of the weightlifting curriculum in American schools. And now the Coulter family called the Todds, asking if they might want to buy the collection.
29:05 Roman Mars? The Todds didn't really have the money for it, but they bought it anyway, thinking it might be valuable. Jan spent days packing up 380 boxes of stuff at Coulter's old house.
29:16 Speaker 01 I fell through the ceiling while I was there. I stepped out with a box in my hands, fell down on top of the television, which exploded underneath my butt while the family was eating dinner on TV trays.
29:29 Roman Mars? Eventually, Jan opened up the boxes and started sorting through it all.
29:34 Speaker 02 Now, Jan already knew what muscle magazines looked like. Terry had subscriptions, and they turned up at the house every month showing men doing muscly stuff. Every once in a while, there'd be something about a woman, but not much. But the magazines in Coulter's boxes were different. They went back to the late 1800s, and instead of showing old-timey strongmen hoisting globe barbells overhead, there were all these stories about women lifting weights, or anvils, or their husbands, or ponies. These were women with names like Sanduina, and Volcano, and Minerva, and for the most part, they worked in circus and vaudeville. But Jan saw them for what they were.
30:20 Speaker 01 They are professional athletes, in my mind, you know, just like somebody is who's a pro baseball player. They are making a living. In some cases, they're making a pretty good living.
30:30 Roman Mars? Jan had spent years smashing strength records, and the press had covered her like she was the first woman to do it. But sitting among those boxes of old magazines, she realized that there were women who had been lifting comparable amounts of weight many decades before she was even born.
30:47 Speaker 02 And Jan couldn't stop thinking about these women and the thrilling lives they led. They were celebrities, even though this was the Victorian era, when doctors warned about women's uteruses falling out, and how the strain of bicycle riding would permanently disfigure their faces.
31:07 Speaker 01 What I kept trying to figure out in my head was why they had so much acceptance for what they did. Like, why was that okay in those years and not okay now? Partly it's because our notions of extreme sinness had not yet been adopted.
31:24 Speaker 02 Reading the coverage of these women, Jan marveled that someone like Katie Sanduina weighed 200 pounds, and she was billed as the strongest and the most beautiful woman in the world. She didn't have to choose between those two qualities, like so many women in Jan's generation had to do.
31:42 Speaker 01 People don't want to be smaller. They want to be bigger. They think that's better for them to weigh more.
31:49 Speaker 02 Jan realized that back then, more was thought to be preferable. It meant you were healthy and prosperous. Over the next few years, Jan began research for a dissertation based on what she found in those boxes. The strong women got her looking back even further in history, where she uncovered previous generations of exercise culture. Eventually, she coined a phrase for what these women embodied. She called it majestic womanhood. It was a way of being a woman in which vitality and strength weren't just tolerated or treated as something kind of freakish. They were central.
32:31 Roman Mars? And then, just a few years into Jan's academic career, she received some devastating news. At age 36, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It was a total shock.
32:44 Speaker 01 And when we finally went to see the woman who was the oncologist who was going to treat me, she was pretty straightforward about the fact that ovarian in the 80s was not a good thing to get. And she wanted me to understand that my survival chances were about 25% because statistically, it was a really hard one to get rid of.
33:04 Speaker 02 Driving home with Terry, the two of them processed the news.
33:09 Speaker 01 And I'm crying, and he's driving me home. And he says, "One of you not been in the top 25% at anything?" And so, that's what I held on to through that process. And still here.
33:27 Speaker 02 Jan survived, but the cancer and the treatment meant that she and Terry would not have the kids they'd once hoped for. It was a blow, but they eventually decided their legacy would be something else. They would create an archive documenting the world they shared and loved so much.
33:45 Speaker 01 For Terry and I, you know, we didn't have children. But the thing that we can leave behind us is trying to preserve this sport and this activity. And it's really the foundation of what we're doing here at the Stark Center.
33:59 Speaker 02 When Jan and I met to talk, we sat in a conference room at the Stark Center at the University of Texas, where Jan and Terry's archive now lives. It's the largest collection of its kind in the world. And it's become the definitive archive, not just of weightlifting, but also exercise and what's known as physical culture. The archive holds thousands of books, hundreds of magazines, and photos, correspondence, and artifacts.
34:29 Roman Mars? Terry died in 2018, and Jan is now the keeper of it all. She still directs the center, and she's still acquiring collections to add to the archive.
34:38 Speaker 02 When I asked her if she still lifts, she said she has a home gym in her garage, but that she doesn't use it much these days because it's currently full of boxes. They're the archives of David Webster, the Scottish strength historian who brought Jan to Scotland to lift the Denny Stones.
34:57 Speaker 01 Right now, that gym is filled with 250-some boxes of David Webster's collection.
35:02 Speaker 02 There's like some poetry to that, you know?
35:05 Speaker 01 Yes.
35:06 Speaker 02 But of course, Jan is still strong. She said she can still crush a bottle cap between her fingers at age 74.
35:14 Speaker 01 I have to have a couple beers. It makes me looser, I think. It's like, yeah, but I can still do it.
35:23 Speaker 02 I first learned about Jan Todd's life in the book On Muscle by Bonnie Tsui. Bonnie and Jan are butts. They text regularly. And Bonnie said it's been so gratifying for Jan to see the cultural change around women and strength. The idea that ordinary women should be lifting weights for the health of their bones and their brains, for their longevity, those ideas now get covered in the mainstream press.
35:49 Speaker 04 There's something that has shifted. It's kind of like the change that is like so slow and incremental, and then all at once, you see it.
35:58 Speaker 02 I think I've been swept up in this pro muscle change. I grew up firmly in the post-Titel IX era, when being a fast, strong girl was cool. I've always been athletic, but now, as a middle-aged woman with kids and aging parents, being strong feels non-negotiable. I've started to lift weights for the first time in my life. I've got a bunch of dumbbells, and I work out most mornings, followed by a cold shower and a smoothie laced with creatine. And out of all my midlife crisis-inflected habits, I think it's weightlifting that's going to stick. I feel a kind of resolve to continue it when I launch my kid into the
36:40 Speaker 02 air at the pool, or when I hold my dad's painfully skinny tricep and help him out of his chair. All the strong men and strong women of history were right. Muscle really is currency, and it is independence, and it does matter.
36:58 Speaker 04 Lifting weights, like lifting a heavy thing, like no matter where you are, where you begin, like to lift something that's heavy for you, and it doesn't mean that it's a bajillion pounds. It means that it's hard for you to do it. And when you do it, it means something. It means that you have done something that you could not do before.
37:20 Speaker 02 The whole idea at the heart of strength training is progressive overload. It's the idea that you lift a weight that's genuinely hard for you. It's heavy enough that it's almost impossible to lift on your last rep. You do that until it stops being hard, and then you add weight, and it's hard again. You get strong by repeatedly asking your body to do something that it can't quite do yet. Building muscle is about discovering a limit and then surpassing it. And it's only recently, in the grand scheme of things, that women have even been invited to try.
37:58 Speaker 01 Because if you think about the history of all this, men have been given the right to be strong from the beginning, from time immemorial, whereas women have only, really in about the last 50 years or so, have we actually said to women, "It's okay to try to run fast. It's okay to try to be strong." Sometimes people ask me, like, "Well, how strong can women be?" And my standard answer for that is, "We don't know."
38:32 Roman Mars? 99% of Is Well was reported and produced this week by Delaney Hall and edited by Meg Kramer, with additional production by Jacob Medina Gleason. Mix by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Real. Fact checking by Graham Hesha. Special thanks this week to Bonnie Tsui. Her book On Muscle is excellent. It covers Jan Todd's life, but also profiles other fascinating strong people and covers more history and science than we were able to get to in this episode. Check it out. Kathy Too is our executive producer. Kirk Colstead is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, LaSham Adon, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Talon and Rain Stradlin, and me, Roman
39:14 Roman Mars? Mars. The 99% of Is Well logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.
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Previous 100 Objects #23: Coin From the Ship of Gold Page updated November 11, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
