How Much Is a Million Pounds?

"What we face may look insurmountable. But I learned something from all those years of training and competing. I learned something from all those sets and reps when I didn't think I could lift another ounce of weight. What I learned is that we are always stronger than we know."

- Arnold Schwarzenegger

A million pounds is...lots. But this much weight is tough to actually visualize, so here's a list of things that weigh a million pounds (or thereabouts):

• 40 school buses (a typical school bus weighs 22,000 to 28,000 lbs, so I used 25,000 lbs for ease of calculation)
• An Airbus A380, currently the world's largest passenger jet, has a maximum takeoff weight of about 1.1 million pounds
• The Union Pacific Big Boy, one of the largest steam locomotives ever built, weighed 1.2 million pounds with a tender full of water and coal

Source

Other things that weigh a million pounds:

• About 3 blue whales (a blue whale, the largest mammal on the planet, weighs about 375,000 pounds)
• About 5 right whales (right whales are smaller than blue whales, weighing on average about 200,000 pounds; also, because I can't resist gratuitous trivia, right whales have the largest testes of any animal--each testicle weighs about 1100 pounds)

Blue Whale: Source

If you want to think of a million pounds from a monetary standpoint, here are the stats:

• In Canadian pennies (now an extinct species), you would need 193,026, 903 of the 2.35 g coins, or $1,930,269.03
• In quarters, 103,093,784 of the 4.4 g coins, or $25,773,196
• In loonies, 72,343,196 of the 6.27 g coins, or $72,343,196
• In toonies, 65,547,981 of the 6.92 g coins, or $32,773,990
• And, because my son asked, one million British pounds (pounds in pounds, get it?) would be 47,746,941 of the 9.5 g coins, or $74,485,228 Canadian dollars at the current exchange rate of 1.56

But what about the kettlebells? Kettlebells are typically weighed in kilograms, and one million pounds equals 453,592 kilos, so that's

• 28,357 x 16 kg (my current competition weight)
• 25,200 x 18 kg (my competition weight for this fall)
• 22,686 x 20 kg (sometime in the future...I hope)

That's a lot of stuff to lift.