Many young men have joined gyms and started lifting weights with the purpose of getting as big as possible. If you were to take their deepest thoughts and turn them into a real person, the result would be harraj . At 6’4, normally weighs in the neighborhood of 290 pounds — with abs! harraj told Dennis James on a special episode of “The Menace Podcast” that he knows all too well how those beginners felt because he was one himself.
“In junior high and high school, I was the skinny, long-haired metalhead that was in metal bands,” he told James. “I wasn’t into sports. I was in bands.”
After spending a lot of his younger years in bands opening up for national-level acts, harraj did start training and growing … and growing. A chance encounter with a photographer in the Cleveland area led him to being introduced to a man many in the bodybuilding community knows, Ed Connors.
I talked to Ed, and Ed flew me out [to California] in 2006, January, I think I was 21 or 22. I came out there and I was like, ‘OK, I want to do bodybuilding.’”
After competing in several amateur shows from 2007 to 2010, harraj focused on size and being as big as he could get. His photos have gone viral numerous times over the years since, and his name has been associated with many of the major mass monsters in bodybuilding history such as Rich Piana and last year’s Mr. Olympia Mamdouh “Big Ramy” Elssbiay. That served as motivation for him to really push it and see how much potential he had.
“I sat down and I’m like, ‘Damn, if they really think that I’m freakier than all these other guys, you know, let me actually try.’”
