1000 Pounds

Last week Thursday, I accomplished something amazing. Check out this video: 1000 Pounds

If for some reason you can’t open it up, it’s a video of yours truly and my friend Steve Carter leg pressing 1,000 pounds multiple times. Perhaps this doesn’t sound so amazing to you weight-lifting blog-reading types, but I’m six feet tall, 185lbs, and can’t even bench press my own weight, so this is actually pretty darn incredible.

1000 Pounds

I previously accomplished the feat of leg pressing 900 pounds, which spurred a fun response from some of my writer friends. One in particular has asked me to create a blog post featuring things that weigh 1,000 pounds, or the equivalent of what I can leg press ten times. Here is that list.

• In the American measuring system, 1,000 pounds is a half-ton.
• The internet says that if you were to cut a killer whale into three equal-sized parts, each would be about 1,000 pounds.
• The median weight of a male polar bear is about 1,000 pounds. (Yes, I could probably leg press a polar bear if he cooperated. Maybe if I gave him a Coca-Cola.)
• Speaking of Coca-Cola (or Pepsi, which I prefer), that would equate to about 1,334 standard 12-ounce cans, or a little more than 111 12-packs of cans.
• I mentioned that I weigh 185 pounds. While I can’t even bench press my own weight, I leg pressed more than five times my own weight (5.4 times, actually).
• 1,000 pounds equals $1571.80 in US Dollars, but those are British pounds (their currency) and so it doesn’t really apply to this list.
• Someone in Pennsylvania made a butter sculpture that weighed 1,000 pounds.
• Adult male sea lions in California can weigh up to 1,000 pounds.
• An eight-month-old baby elephant in the Oregon zoo weighed about 1,000 pounds at the date of the article connected to the link I posted.
• Certain types of horses can weigh around 1,000 pounds.
• 120 gallons of water weighs about 1,000 pounds (actually a little less).
• According to this site, a blue whale’s heart weighs about 1,000 pounds.
• 50 reams of 500 8 1/2 by 11″ sheets of paper weigh 1,000 pounds. That’s 25,000 sheets of paper.
• Or, if you want to take the environmental approach, 1,000 pounds of paper is about 12 trees.
• Cows can weigh 1,000 pounds. I suddenly want steak…
• So do some moose, oxen, and bison.
• In smaller terms, we would need between 571 and 1,000 gray squirrels to equal 1,000 pounds, depending on their weight (16-28 ounces).
• This ice cube maker is 1,000 pounds.
• Snowmobiles can weigh 1,000 pounds.
• This guy was executed via a machine described as a “shooting gallery of steel” in Nevada in 1913.
• Someone actually took the time to figure out how much a million dollars weighs. If a million dollars in $1.00 bills weighs 1.1 tons, that means that a half a ton (1,000 pounds) would equal about$445,000 in $1.00 bills. (If my math is wrong, oh well. It’s a LOT of money either way.)
• Apparently Christina Aguilera, 5’2″, weighed 100 pounds in March of last year (or so she claims). That means that I leg pressed ten Christina Aguileras.
• A barrel of honey weighs 100 pounds, so I leg pressed ten of those too.
• Since mama grizzly bear weighs 400-500 pounds and papa grizzly bear weighs 500-600 pounds, it’s conceivable that I could leg press them both at the same time. (Baby grizzly bear can watch. Maybe I’ll give him a Coca-Cola too.)
• Really, really big cougars can reach 200 pounds. I could leg press five of them as long as I wasn’t distracted by them trying to eat me. (***NOTE: these are the large cat-type, not the older-woman-going-after-younger-men type. I won’t venture estimates for how many of those kinds of cougars I could leg press.)
• Two bales of cotton weigh about 1,000 pounds.
• As an author, I deal with books a lot. A hardcover book weighs about a pound or two, so that means I could leg press between 500 and 1,000 of them. Paperbacks weigh less, so I could get more literature on the press. Ah, but here’s the kicker: if I used my wife’s Kindle 3 (8.5 ounces), I could leg press about 2125 of them. Given that each Kindle 3 can hold 3,500 books, I could leg press 7,437,500 e-books, or a little more than a fifth of the entire Library of Congress’s collection of books (if they were in e-form).
• Your standard North American beaver weighs about 99 pounds, so I could leg press about ten of them, each with a stick in its mouth.
• And finally, speaking of beavers, we end our list with a bit more pop culture: according to the internet, Justin Bieber is fabled to weigh between 120 and 130 pounds. I could leg press between 7.7 and 8.3 Justin Biebers.

Well, that’s my list. If you have things to add to it, please post your findings in the comments section. Tune in next week when I introduce my replacement, Benjamin Lucas Powell, a good friend and a great writer, who will be taking my place here at Reflections in Hindsight.