Seven months after having a tumor removed from his ear canal in 2015, Jon Templeman ran the Mill Race half marathon.
Templeman doesn’t run those kind of long distances these days, but he’s into a different type of sport — strongman competition. On Saturday, he will take part in the Indiana’s Strongest Man competition in Huntington.
“I was never seriously into weightlifting before I’d had my surgery,” Templeman said. “I’d piddle around with it a little bit when I was in the Marines. This wasn’t my lifestyle. I had a really hard go after the surgery. Running helped to some degree, but it wasn’t until I got into strongman that I started to feel normal again.”
Templeman was 34 years old in September 2014 when he began feeling lightheaded. When the condition got worse and he experienced dizziness, he was treated for an ear infection and vertigo. After asking for an MRI, doctors discovered an acoustic neuroma lodged in his brain near his auditory nerve.
After months of insurance negotiations and donations, Templeman was able to undergo surgery performed by Dr. Rick A. Friedman, one of the top surgeons in the field of acoustic neuroma surgery, in March 2015 in California. Friedman was able to remove the 1 1/2-centimeter tumor, but Templeman lost the hearing in his right ear.
A few years ago, Templeman had hearing implant surgically inserted to help offset the hearing deficit.
“It’s an interesting phenomenon because I do have a deficit,” Templeman said. “I had half the balance of a normal person, but because I’ve been so aggressive with training, I probably have better balance than an average person. But if I’m walking, and I turn my head or avert my eyes, I can lose my balance. That’s part of the reason why I love strongman so much. It challenges me to focus on my balance at all times.”
Templeman began weight training shortly after running the Mill Race half marathon in 2015. He entered in his first strongman competition in January 2020 and won the first event, the deadlift.
But after that, Templeman experienced rhabdomyolsis, where the muscle fibers break down from pushing too hard.
“I set a goal for myself to one day compete in a strongman competition,” Templeman said. “The very first one, I started very well. I pushed myself really hard, and I had just immense back pain and I had to go to the ER. Unbeknownst to me, I had kidney failure, and I ended up in the hospital for five days. So it was a little bit of a setback.”
Templeman did one more strongman competition in September 2020 as a heavyweight, then dropped from 280 pounds to the high 220s to get down to the lightweight novice category.
In 2021, Templeman did three competitions in 2021, finishing as high as second in April of that year at Unbreakable Crossfit in Plainfield. He then did an event that August as a lightweight Masters entrant.
After taking a break in 2022, Templeman did an event this January in Plainfield as a Masters heavyweight and had a personal-best 550-pound deadlift. He know weighs 228, which is just under the maximum 231 pounds for the masters lightweight division.
“I wish they had a division for post-op brain surgery, but I think I’m the only one,” Templeman joked.
Templeman hired a professional strongman coach and has been preparing for the Indiana’s Strongest Man competition for the past three months. This will be his first time in that competition.
Indiana’s Strongest Man consists of five events. The first is a 16-inch axle deadlift, with a starting weight of 405 pounds. The second is an overhead press medley with four different implements — a 110-pound dumbbell, 195-pound keg, 205-pound axle and 195-pound 12-inch log — and 60 seconds to press all four. The third is a yoke press medley — a large weighted implement with crossbar, with competitors lifting a 625-pound yoke clear off the ground and walking 30 feet, then transitioning to a 200-pound log and pressing overhead three times. The fourth is a tossing a 235-pound keg load over a 56-inch bar. The fifth is a sled pull and reverse walking backward with spinning V-handles.
“I’d love to win it,” Templeman said. “I think it’s not likely that I will win because it’s a high-press event, and I have a knee injury that has limited what I’ve been able to train. I’d say my primary goal is to get through each event without getting injured and not zero (not score in) any events. There’s two or three of those events that I think I have a decent chance of winning.”
Templeman trains in a gym in his garage on U.S. 31 between Columbus and Edinburgh.
“Occasionally I’ll drag a tire or a sled with some weight on it up and down 31,” Templeman said. “It gets quite a bit of attention.”
A 1999 graduate of Pike High School in Indianapolis, Templeman entered the Marines after graduation and did four years of active duty. He used the GI bill to go to nursing school at Ivy Tech in Columbus to get his associates degree, then after his surgery, went back online through Western Governors University to get bachelor’s.
Templeman, who worked for Our Hospice of South Central Indiana for seven years, now works in home care for American Nursing Care.
“It’s been an interesting journey,” said Templeman, now 42. “I never could have imagined that I’m doing the stuff I do now.”
