By TERESA M. WALKER
(AP) Kara Mann adjusts a weight-bearing device as she trains for her strongwoman competitions in Nashville, TN.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - To Kara Mann, part of the fun comes from shocking guys who don't understand why any woman would want to take part in strongman competitions.
"Then they see me flip like a 750-pound tire," Mann said. "I do lots of fun things - like where they're flipping the 350 tire, and I go over there and flip the 750-pound tire right next to them."
Certainly an eye-opener.
The 5-foot-6 woman with long brown hair may look like any other student on Vanderbilt's campus, but she definitely likes to be different. That's why she's majoring in chemical engineering and spending her free time competing as a strongman - both male-dominated fields.
(AP) Kara Mann hands weights to her boyfriend, Scott Porter, on Oct. 15, 2005 in Nashville, Tenn.
And Mann would love to have more women follow her.
"I love the sport. It has become my thing, and I want to try to get more people into it. More women need to try it because, honestly, it's empowering," Mann said.
Mann won the 2004 national strongwoman title less than two years after her first competition in a sport best known for filling odd time slots on cable television.
She has pulled a 14,000-pound A-4 fighter jet 47 feet, carried 200 pounds in each hand in an event called the farmer's walk for 200 feet in 30.37 seconds, and once dead-lifted a cheerleader in Arizona.
All this without bulking up a frame, which hovers around 165 pounds of mostly muscle, with any supplements or chemical assistance, she says.
"It's a hobby for me. I would never try to morph my body that much. That's not why I do it. There are some people who do it for a living and take it incredibly serious and want to morph their bodies to the extreme," Mann said.
She didn't stumble onto the sport until her senior year in high school in Massachusetts. Already on the basketball, track and cross country teams, she wasn't interested in lifting weights until she saw her boyfriend's petite aunt compete.
"I was like, 'I could do that,'" Mann recalled. "That's something that nobody that I know really has ever tried."
Mann finished third in her first meet, the Massachusetts State Championship, in August 2002. Less than a year later, she won the same meet. Her mother, Liane, a psychotherapist in Boxford, Mass., wasn't sure what to make of her daughter's new passion.
"She really cleared me up right away that this is speed, strength and stamina. It's like, 'How fast can I pull the car? How long can I pull the car?' You have to be mobile and have agility and all those things come into play. I kept saying, 'What the heck is she doing?'"
Mann chose Vanderbilt from among 12 colleges and decided to major in chemical engineering because her father and a brother are chemists. She found a group of strongman competitors in nearby Brentwood and kept working out.
On campus, she surprised people when she told them about her hobby. Professor Bridget Rogers, who had Mann in class as a sophomore in spring 2004, said she saw an extremely fit, beautiful young lady, not the "moose-like" body type associated with strongmen.
"Every now and again you'll catch a glimpse of bruises and scrapes on her shoulders and arms, evidence of her training, but I wouldn't have imagined that she competed in these events if she hadn't told me," Rogers said.
Mann won the North American Strongman women's title in August 2004, two months after her parents bought a new camcorder to record her pulling the A-4 jet in California.
A former president of Vanderbilt's Society of Women Engineers, she cut back her competition schedule this year - though she did manage to fit in a title at Washington State's Strongest Man & Woman competition in June - because she was working on a research project at Stanford.
Mann's workout schedule took another hit recently when she spent a weekend in Mississippi delivering supplies and clearing Hurricane Katrina debris. And being in her brother's wedding in August kept her from representing the United States in an international meet.
But Dione Wessels, vice president of North American Strongman, said Mann is helping attract more women to the group started in 1996.
"When people see women such as herself, it makes them say, 'Oh, OK. She's muscular. She's pretty. I can do this as well. I don't have to be a 200-pound woman to do this, because she still has a lot of femininity," Wessels said.
Mann doesn't plan to quit any time soon, even though she doesn't know what type of job she'll get after graduating next spring.
"A lot of people ask me: 'How long are you going to do this?'" she said.
"As long as I can."
