The softer side to Australia’s Strongest Woman Alirene Clair

A new mother to a beautiful daughter, she had lost her sense of self and direction.

She found it again lifting weights few mortals can, and in March this year was officially crowned Australia’s Strongest Woman.

Growing up, Clair had always suspected she was exceptionally strong. Back home in New Zealand she’d been stronger than all the boys in school but kept that under wraps.

“Being stronger than the boys at school wasn’t a cool thing,” she says. “It wasn’t something I even remotely shared with anybody.”

After school, a decade working as a dairy farmer proved she was strong by adult standards, too.

“When the calves are born they weigh about 50-60kgs, and I would be lifting one over my shoulder and carrying it up the hill and drop it off, and he’d (a workmate) be falling over with it.”

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In 2018, she was able to put some kind of number on just how strong she was as she stepped into a gym for the first time in her life. The gym was stunned, the lifter oblivious.

“One of the guys asked me, ‘What’s my max?’ And I didn’t know what that was.

“I was like, ‘My max what?’ He was like, ‘How much can you lift (deadlift) on the barbell?’”

So the duo started to load up the plates. Eighty kilos? Not a problem. Ninety? Too easy. A hundred? Keep it coming. All the way up to 180kgs.

“I didn’t realise that was a lot of weight. I was oblivious to what was going on, and the guy was like, ‘That is really strong’. I was like, ‘Really?’

“It took me a little while to understand that I’m a really strong human being. I still don’t [understand it] today, I still think that I’m not that strong.”

In 2019 she’d join a dedicated Strongman gym – Coco’s Gym on the Gold Coast; take out the women’s title at the Australian Strongman Alliance nationals; deadlifting a car in front of her awestruck mother; and compete for the title of World’s Strongest Woman at the Official Strongman Games. All the more remarkable given she’d been on the waitlist for a gastric bypass in 2017.

For those wondering how to deadlift a car, she has two bits of advice:

- The big difference between deadlifting a car and a bar is that the lift gets heavier the higher you get.

- “There’s no secret. It really is just brute strength. Use your legs, lean back and hope for the best.”

*****

As incredible as it has been seeing what she can do physically, it’s what the world of strength athletics has done for Clair’s mental health that she truly values.

Strength athletics lifted her up when she was at her lowest and remains a key part to staying healthy, both mentally and physically.

“It was pretty tough. I’d just had my daughter. She was two years old when I picked up the sport. I had really lost my way,” she says of her state of mind before she started this journey.

“I was at that point of thinking there was no way out (of this mental state). I worked with counsellors speaking to them about my mental health issues.

“I just was at the bottom of life. I couldn’t see the light out of the sh-t spot I had gotten myself into.

“Strength sports, Strongman, really showed me there was so much more to life than I thought there was. That in order to get yourself out of those deep dark places it was up to you.

“It’s the same when you lift weights. Only you can lift the weights, only you can get yourself out of the mental space that you were in.

“It’s toughened me up big time and just given me something else to look forward to in life.”

Having fallen in love with strength athletics in 2019 and finding something that gave her direction, Clair was not ready to give it up when the world went into lockdown – even as she returned to New Zealand to attend to family matters.

On the family farm, she set up her own home gym. She had 280 kilograms worth of equipment brought over from Melbourne, tacking it on to a local gym’s order to save on shipping.

“I didn’t ship any plates or anything like that because that would have been hella expensive,” she laughs. “I bought those locally.”

“Normally I would never [have shipped the equipment] but I knew if I didn’t my mental health – I would absolutely crumble. I needed that outlet and that space for myself to survive.

“It sounds so dramatic. But it really was because lifting is my out, it’s my go-to when shit’s tough, it’s my go-to when I want my own time.”

What equipment money couldn’t reasonably buy, she built or improvised. Crowbars and water containers were lifted, tractors were pulled.

“I made do with whatever I had around me to get that exercise and get that time lifting weights so I could feel like who I was before I went back to New Zealand for that little bit of time.”

Back in Australia in 2021, Clair carried on where she had left off, setting a new national women’s record for the heaviest log lift.

Twelve months on she took out the title of Australia’s Strongest Woman, squatting 170kg for 13 reps along the way.

It’s taken a lot of work to get here, with training taking up three to four hours a day on top of her day job in commercial grazing.

Once embarrassed by her strength, she’s embraced her title as the nation’s strongest woman and wants to empower women everywhere. That starts with her daughter.

“I want her to see that women can do absolutely anything,” she says. “There’s this consensus that women or girls aren’t strong, and we are, we’re incredibly strong.

“I love that my daughter walks around and says how she can’t wait to be just as strong as mum. For me that sets her up for a healthy teenage and adulthood about her body.

“For a while I was always embarrassed about being stronger than the guys or stronger than my friends, and I’m not anymore but I never want her to be embarrassed about the superpowers that she’s been gifted.

“That’s definitely something I want her to learn and know from my journey.

“And that applies to everything, absolutely anything you put your mind to, there’s no limits to what you can do except the limits you put yourself.”