Building a body: rebuilding a life

The gym at the Chilliwack Landing Leisure Centre is teeming with activity on a busy Tuesday morning. On one side of the room people ride stationary bikes and walk on treadmills, most of them wearing headphones and listening to music to filter out the background noise.

The background noise is caused by the various weight machines littered throughout the room. Leg presses. Bench presses. Machines for lats. Machines for pecs. Machines for biceps, triceps and gluts.

There are grunts and moans, huffing and puffing — mixed in with the clanking of metal on metal and the energetic sounds of workout music pumped in through the speakers.

Through this chaos strides a woman who clearly thrives in this environment. The 37 year old is tall, lean and muscular.

Everyone has a place where they fit, and this is it for Lucie Hall. Most days she’s here, working as a personal trainer. When she’s not doing that she’ll be working out on her own. Hall is to the gym as a hockey player is to an ice rink. It’s hard to imagine one without the other.

If one didn’t know better, one would assume she’d be born with a towel in one hand and a one-pound hand weight in the other.

It wasn’t always this way.

Hall was born and raised in the South African city of Pretoria and moved to Canada as a teenager, 23 years ago.

Like most kids of that era, she was an active child. This was, after all, a time before video game consoles when children still played outdoors and no one talked about an obesity epidemic running rampant among our youth.

But when the teenage years set in, all that healthy activity ceased, replaced instead by television, telephones and other lazier pursuits. Most of us have been there.

Fifteen years ago, when Hall was 22-years-old, she was involved in a car accident. Her vehicle was rear ended and she ended up with horrible back pain — the kind that makes flopping on the couch with two extra-strength Tylenol capsules seem like a very attractive option.

She was tired, depressed and dogged by constant pain. She missed three months of work, and despite frequent trips to physiotherapists and chiropractors, she found little to no relief. She also gained weight, adding about 40 pounds.

And she smoked. And she had asthma. Stand 22-year-old Lucie Hall next to 37-year-old Lucie Hall and you likely wouldn’t have recognized the former. This was not a healthy woman.

Fitness wise, you’d think this was rock bottom. You’d be wrong.

To her credit, Hall worked her butt off to lose those 40 pounds, but in the process she whittled her way down to just one meal a day and developed an eating disorder.

Now we’re at rock bottom.

Hall had never stepped foot in a gym until she was 22-years-old, but it didn’t take long to find she had a taste for it.

Eating disorders. Pain. Family and personal problems. All of that seemed to disappear when she walked through the doors and hopped on a treadmill. Hall believes most people saddled with her problems would have used them as an excuse to stay home. But she needed the gym to cope.

There were lots of days back then when she didn’t want to get out of bed. But Hall came to realize the gym was her natural Prozac.

As long as she had that escape route available, she could deal with anything.

Five years ago, at the age of 32, Hall lost her mother and spiralled into another depression, and again, it was working out that brought her back.

In the darkest days, she felt dead inside and she rarely went near a gym for four years. When she finally got back into it last January, she told a friend she was starting to feel alive again.

Natural Prozac.

Maybe she takes things a bit too far sometimes. One night she found herself plagued by a horrific migraine.

At this point most people are lying down on a bed in a darkened room praying for an end to the pain.

Not Hall.

She was downstairs at her house, with the lights off and her workout music playing almost inaudibly, walking on the treadmill. At that point, even she had to, half jokingly, ask herself what on Earth she was doing.

When Hall got back into it last January, she did so with a clear goal in mind. Her personal trainer suggested she look into body-building. This of course is the sport wherein competitors display their physiques to a panel of judges, who assign points based on their aesthetic appearance.

What better pursuit for a gym junkie who wants to take things to the next level?

The immediate image that will pop to mind with bodybuilding is that of a young Arnold Schwartznegger, with biceps bulging and veins protruding in an almost grotesque manner.

This is not what Hall wanted to do. With her naturally lean physique, she chose to train for figure competitions — those which reward toned, muscled but not over-muscled bodies.

She trained 16 weeks for her first competition, three times a day focusing on cardio and a series of exercises targeted to very specific muscles.

She ate a rigid diet loaded with lots and lots of chicken, brown rice, broccoli and almonds. At the 2007 Western Canadian Tested Bodybuilding Fitness and Figure Championships (what a mouthful), it all paid off.

Hall travelled to Kelowna April 28 and surprised herself by placing first in the masters division (35+) and second in the medium-tall class.

The feeling was indescribable. She was just happy to be there, considering herself lucky to simply be standing on the stage with the other women.The journey was supposed to be the reward. And then they rewarded her. Judges gave her two trophies in her inaugural competition. Validation doesn’t get much better than that.

Then she went and placed first at the Sandra Wickham Fall Classic in New Westminster in early November.

More validation.

She woke up in a hotel one morning, the day after a competition. Lying in the bed, she opened one eye and peered at two trophies sitting on the end table. Then she closed her eyes, pleased to know it wasn’t all just some fabulous dream.

Hall admits bodybuilding is a selfish sport. It is time consuming. It requires single-minded focus. It certainly takes a rare breed to do it, and do it successfully.

Hall can’t even crack open a pint of Haagen Daaz, for fear it will monkey up her metabolism, or just make a body used to healthy eating feel like garbage.

It’s all about discipline and sacrifice, and without the support of her family, Hall simply couldn’t succeed. Thus far she’s gotten ample support from husband Mark, and kids Zach (12) and Matt (18).

As good a feeling as she gets winning a competition, she gets an even better feeling when she looks into the crowd and sees a friendly face looking back.

She remembers hearing Zach yelling out, ‘Go Mom!’ from the audience. Two words that meant so much.

As long as her body can take it, as long as her family can take it and as long as the sport’s power brokers let her enter the competitions, she plans to keep going.

Hall’s new aspiration is the Canadian Bodybuilding Federation’s National World Qualifier, which takes place June 16 at York University in Toronto.

The sky is the limit for a woman on a mission. Hall has seen rock bottom and now she can see the mountain peak.

Who’d have ever thought you could relieve a burden by lifting a weight?