Hostile Gym's Robert Mcaulay lands Lanarkshire's Strongest Novice

Winner Robert Mcaulay (centre) is pictured with runner-up Stuart Thomson (left) and third placed Lukasz Biernat (Submitted pic)

After five rounds of fierce competition among 23 participants, Robert beat Edinburgh’s Stuart Thomson into overall second place with Hostile clubmate Lukasz Biernat back in third spot.Hostile Gym supremo Martin Lennox told the Times & Speaker: “Winning a strongman competition takes consistency and hard work and Robert showed that all day.“He wasn’t out of the top four in any of the events.“Although Lukasz had a first and a second, he also had an eighth that hurt him.”The first event, a 100kg axle press, was won jointly by Robert and Lukasz with Stuart back in fifth place.Robert then consolidated his lead by finishing runner-up in discipline two, the 80kg sandbag carry.And the early leader further boosted his chances of glory by winning the 100kg carry farmers walk, competition number three, with Lukasz finishing fourth to climb into the top two overall.And Lukasz had further cause to celebrate when he pulled 14 repetitions to win event four, the 220kg dead lift, by a wide margin, with Robert back in fifth.This meant that there was still everything to play for going into the fifth and final contest, the 100kg atlas stone lift.With Lukasz only able to finish a disappointing seventh in this one with eight repetitions, he slipped back to a third place finish overall.The 10 repetitions by Stuart saw him snatch overall second, before Robert was the final competitor up.And he duly blasted 11 reps to seal overall victory.There was also a notable performance by Hostile Gym member and Motherwell resident Thomas Baillie, who was in the top three overall positions for most of the day in his first ever competition.But a small error in the final event saw him drop from second place to sixth overall on 90.5 points, just one point behind third spot.Thomas, who has only been training at Hostile for 10 weeks, finished 11th with seven reps in the final event.One more rep would have earned him a tie for third overall.“It was still a brilliant effort,” Martin added.The event was sponsored by Motherwell business Strength Shop, which provided competitors with T-shirts on the day and is delighted to be supporting a local gym.Thomas and the other strongmen will be back in action at Hostile in the same format on March 16, 2019.