Until I find a new adventure, this will be the final post for a while.  

The photo CD arrived in the mail today. These are some of the mandatory poses each contestant is required to do. Mine still have many weaknesses, but the fact that I even know the difference between a good front lat spread and a poor one is amusing. This time last year I couldn't have predicted that I'd desire that knowledge. Makes me wonder what will be of interest in May 2010.  

A couple of weeks have passed between the competition and "once again real life." The days have created a solid beaver dam between then and now; there is no flow of reality between the two--Yesterday never really happened, but Today is screaming for attention like a restless toddler on a long road trip. 

I guess that is why we keep photos. They are proof our life existed yesterday even though our footprints crumble away as soon as we leave them.

Some photos...

The photo CD is on order, but here are a few shots taken by friends in the audience. More to follow.


The pose down.











The end of the journey.



Parting shot.

left to right: Jennifer, me, Tina, and Jorge (Tina's Sweetie).

"Take the picture and take us to In-N-Out!"

Epilogue: If a gal binges in the forest does anybody see?

Eek, it is Tuesday, three days after the competition. And I have not stopped eating since Saturday night. This phase of training may be the hardest one yet: turning the dial past "I'm done" and back to moderation.

By Saturday I had: starved myself down to 121 pounds, painted my body to look like an orange Oompaloompa, then oiled it; sat in a dressing room behind stage and listened to women discuss how to keep their tiny posing suits from slipping off their ample breasts (with a perfectly sober tone, one gal recommended a type of tile adhesive sold at Home Depot); taken first place in the masters class only because I was the sole participant in my age group. The day was, in a nutshell, surreal.

But now that it is over, I seem to be in locked in an eating frenzy that is beginning to unnerve me. I allowed it to take its course on Sunday. It was the day after and I had no intention of holding back on anything. My shrunken stomach did its best to process the pizza, chocolate, cereal, peanut butter, and pretzels I tossed down my gullet all day, and by the evening, my belly looked about 5 months pregnant.

I thought of the I Love Lucy episode, when Lucy cannot keep up with the candy wrapping at her new job and begins stuffing her cheeks with balls of chocolate to hide her ineptness. My stomach looked like Lucy's cheeks. I had to sit up and read a book until well after midnight waiting to digest enough food to finally get horizontal.

Yesterday I started the day off with oatmeal, and ate clean right up until 3 PM when a bag of brightly colored Easter candies, saved for post-competition started it all again. This morning, I didn't even try to pretend the day would go well. I ate the last Poptart with my morning coffee, and have plowed through anything savory or sweet that gets in my path.

This post-event state is an interesting place. My pumpkin-dyed skin is fading in streaks that makes my skin look plagued with scales and stretch marks, and my belly is bloated and drum tight.

Attractive.

And working out? Are you kidding? I would have scheduled a pap smear and a root canal this week just to get a break from the iron.

The only goal I have for the week is to crawl my way back into some balance.

I gave the welcome tour to a couple new gym members today, and I could see thier wheels turning: wow, must be hard, having a baby at her age... wonder if it was a planned pregnancy...

Apparently, I am not on this crash course alone though. This morning at the bus stop I pulled up next to the van containing my fellow bodybuilding buddy. We hadn't seen one another since Saturday night, when we parted ways at the end of the competition. She sat behind the wheel of her car and we both rolled down our windows and sported a cat-that-ate-the canary grin at one another. We didn't need to even recount the endless list of comestibles that we'd repectively consumed since our last meeting.

"Have you weighed yourself yet?" She asked.

"No way. You?"

"Yep."

"And?"

"Twelve pounds."

Bodybuilding: it is a world of extremes.

The Homestretch

Thursday is winding down. I am in a small state of triumph this evening, two days away from the competition, because I have just consumed my last serving of tuna for a good long time. Today’s last meal today ended the fish-centric protein blitz I have been on for the past several weeks. Tomorrow I get to eat oatmeal for breakfast, and then, every 1.5 to 2 hours I eat bit of granola mixed with strawberry preserves.

The idea is to carb load at the very end in order to bring loft back into the muscles. The carbohydrates pump the muscles and veins and make them more showy. Whatever. All I know is that I hit the grocery store this week and bought three kinds of granola in anticipation.

Earlier in the week as I swept the gym floor and daydreamed about Friday’s menu, I found myself humming It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, at the prospect of all that sugary goodness.

However, Tina raised that damn eyebrow at my elation and said, “Just remember, no water to wash all that down.”

“Oh, right.” I responded. Water Shmater, I thought, just bring on the granola and dump that stinking tuna.

That was then, this is Thursday. I have tapered my water intake each day, and tomorrow I get a mere six ounces for the whole day. Saturday, I don’t drink a drop until after prejudging, somewhere around 2 PM. The granola has lost some of its appeal. I am not certain how it is going to make it past my epiglottis.

And so my new obsession is water—a tall glass in real glass, not plastic, with ice cubes up to the top. I have resisted the urge to drink the abandoned glasses from dinner that sit on the table long after the rest of the dishes are cleared. I have also resisted licking the juice that dripped down my arm as I sliced a kiwi for Audrey’s lunch tomorrow. Each green oval glistened juicy sweet. I quickly put them in a plastic container, in the lunch box, in the fridge. There are now fortress layers between us. It is not that one drop of kiwi fruit or one extra sip of water will change the outcome of the competition, it is simply that once I start—one, sip, one lick, one taste—I will not stop. It has to be all or nothing. If I blow it now, months of work will unravel.

Not everything is torture in this home stretch. I was required to bath in citrus and Epsom salt tonight. The purpose is to, coupled with the dehydration, get the skin to lie flat against the carb-filled muscle. To take it one step further, as bodybuilding tends to do, I completed the bathing and then slathered hemorrhoid cream on like lotion to further shrink the skin. I am trying not to focus so much on that part of the experience this evening, though it is tough not to think about it—I am currently dressed in an old robe and am as sticky as flypaper.

Returning to the positive, it was the first time in YEARS I sat down in my own bathtub. Typically, my showering is done in record time, with a kid pounding on the door, or perched on the toilet stinking up the joint. Tonight I brought in a book to read and sat down in a steamy, lemon-scented heaven. I still ended up with a kid on the toilet stinking up the place, and I didn’t get to crack open the book, but spent the better part of the bath answering questions about fourth-grade homework through the closed bathroom door. It was a decadent experience none-the-less, and in the future, I plan on scheduling in a relaxing bath more often than once every 8 years.

As I wind down this evening, and get ready to lay my sticky body down next to my patient husband, I have a solid feeling of contentment. It may have been the bath, or the act of tossing the last empty tuna can into the recycle bin, or it may simply be the delirium of dehydration altering my mental clarity, but it feels like the journey is complete. It is all essentially over tonight. On Saturday the competition may trump me; the judges may squint in search of my muscles, and the audience may laugh me out onto the sidewalk, but when I reflect on this experience, it is bigger than Saturday’s outcome.

All my labels, the ones I have given myself: the quitter, the pudgy, middle-aged mom, the side-liner, they washed down the drain with the bath water tonight. When I get up on that stage, I will have finished something really hard. Next week I will go back to being a mom, a gardener, a reader, a business owner, a daughter, a wife…And I will like each of those roles a little better, because I am getting along with myself a little better tonight. Hemorrhoid cream and all.