Chris Zablocki has a nightmare one night where Matt Pelletier destroys him in a marathon. Matty was waiting for him at the finish line, already wearing a laurel wreath on his head. Matt hands Chris the runner up prize, which is an envelope. Instead of a check, the envelope contains a piece of paper saying nothing more than ‘Dig’. Chris wakes up in a cold sweat, goes out to his backyard for fresh air and sees a shovel randomly stuck in the ground. He starts digging, and twenty feet down finds this massive rock with MP etched into it.

That’s the story that sort of popped into my head when Chris let us all know just how seriously he was training for the 2013 Vermont City Marathon. In the July/August issue of Level Renner, Chris gave a firsthand account of what he was doing. Apparently, this involved tossing around a 50 pound rock that he named after one of his chief rivals.

Somewhat disappointed, I found out that my origin story was a little off. From Chris:

“It actually all started back on Jaluit Atoll (teaching for a year), where twenty foot waves crashed onto a shore strewn with nice big rocks, when some misbehaving students thought they were too cool for school and needed to be disciplined in Rock Star Club…”

What we now know as FarmStrong started off with a much more Hollywood sounding name, and it wasn’t nearly as supernatural a start as I had hoped.

No matter how it started, we’re happy to finally getting around to discussing it properly. It had turned into somewhat of an inside joke that spawned from that blurb in the magazine. We even had a couple of entertaining discussions about it at the Run 4 Kerri that until now, hadn’t seen the light of day. I was eager to produce this, but right after the R4K we had our own race to deal with. When you’re putting on your own race, non-race items have a way of falling through the cracks.

Apparently Sam Alexander is getting into the act now. He must have the CCSU cross country team tossing Matt Pelletiers around. That could explain their recent New England championship, right? Just how many people will start naming their rocks now? Will Matty P be able to sleep at night? More importantly, will he get someone to come move all those rocks in his yard?

The above pictures are from a FarmStrong session that Zablocki held for Sam. We were hoping for video, but instead we just got these still shots. We’re guessing Chris doesn’t allow the press into his school, and Sam rigged up some sort of hidden camera. But there for all the world to see, sitting in Chris’ hands is…Matt Pelletier.