Hayden man shares comeback from crushing truck accident in new memoir
A 56,000-pound dump truck left Eric Hess with shattered hips and doctors saying he might never walk again. Now the Hayden lifter is turning that survival into a memoir.
Eric Hess is still in the gym six or seven days a week, lifting through arthritis, a prosthetic hip and shoulders with no cartilage left in them. In Hayden, that discipline now sits at the center of 56,000 Pounds: Surviving Was Only the Beginning, the memoir he has published about the 1994 truck accident that nearly killed him and the long rebuild that followed.
Hess was 21, 5-foot-11 and 240 pounds when he was working on a sanitary line installation in Bainbridge, Pennsylvania. A 56,000-pound dump truck rolled over part of his body after the driver did not see him. Hess said the truck dragged him across stones before crushing him, and only when a backfill worker waved and shouted did the driver realize what had happened. X-rays showed a pelvis so badly damaged that doctors told him he might never walk again.
He spent eight weeks lying in his father’s house in Quarryville, Pennsylvania, recovering while a friend regularly brought VHS tapes to help him get through the days. Hess said the hospital and homebound stretch did not end his athletic ambitions. Less than two years later, he was back lifting and bodybuilding competitively, and by 1997 he had set a junior world record in bench press. He later appeared in Muscle & Fitness, turning a local survival story into one of the most striking comeback arcs in strength sports.
Hess moved to North Idaho between 2001 and 2002, and he has remained a long-time Kootenai County presence since then. The memoir was written in a rush of 4 a.m. writing sessions and late-night revisions while he was also working as a real estate agent. Its Amazon listing says the book follows not just the accident and recovery, but also entrepreneurship, world travel and fatherhood.
OpenPowerlifting lists Hess with a 2024 raw personal best total of 567.5 kilograms, including a 147.5-kilogram bench press, a sign that the competitive career he restarted after the crash never really ended. For readers in Hayden and across North Idaho facing injury, chronic pain or the slow losses that come with age, Hess’s story is not just about what happened under a dump truck in Pennsylvania. It is about the routines that came after it, and the stubbornness it took to keep building a life around damage that never fully went away.
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