Chasing My Dream

Taking advice from various people can be confusing. Especially with this sport, there are many opinions about the right way to do things. I decided to stick with one mentor, a man who obviously knows how to win a bodybuilding contest, Tom Walker. Both Tom and his girlfriend Patty have become close friends with my fiancé Peter and I. Their help and encouragement has been invaluable, especially on the day of the competition. There seem to be a million different little “tricks of the trade” designed to make you look better on stage during the contest, and Tom is familiar with a lot of them. Without his help, I would never have discovered a fraction of these tricks. I’ve never seen them in print. It appears to be an oral tradition, passed on from one bodybuilder to the next.

After a few months of extreme dieting, carefully calculated workouts, and many, many hours spent on treadmills, elliptical cross-trainers and stationary bicycles, the day of the contest finally arrived. Eight months earlier, I had weighed 250 pounds. I knew I was carrying some fat, but I was still relatively lean – or so I thought! In the months leading up to the contest, I figured that I would probably lose twenty or thirty pounds as I reduced my body-fat. Twenty pounds went pretty quick, then thirty pounds were gone and it was obvious that I still had to lose more. About a week before the contest, I had lost forty pounds, and I had finally stopped losing weight. The day before the contest, you start depleting the water from your body, so the morning of the contest, I weighed in at 201 pounds! I had lost 50 pounds. I managed to achieve the kind of definition you need to look good on stage. When your body has no fat or water in it, you can see every muscle clearly – this is what the judges are looking for.

Tom gave me some last minute tips, helped me get oiled up properly, and suddenly I was on stage. I was nervous, but I didn’t let it show. After agonizing for months, trying to figure out how to minimize the appearance of my ostomy, I decided that I would wear a “Stoma Cap”. There would be practically no food in my system so I shouldn’t be experiencing a lot of output the day of the contest. The cap will hold a little bit of output, and there is a charcoal filter with a tiny hole to let gas escape if necessary. To compete in a contest like this, you need to have a very dark tan. Fortunately there are tanning lotions that darken your skin without overexposing yourself to harmful rays. I knew I would have to find a way to make the plastic of the Stoma Cap darker, hopefully it would blend with the color of my tanned skin, and be less noticeable. I decided to spray paint the Stoma Cap brown. By sheer luck, the color paint I found at the hardware store two weeks earlier, matched my skin color so closely, that from a distance, you could hardly tell it was there. 

While I was backstage, the other contestants got a good look at it. Some of them stared, and then looked away when they realized that I saw them staring at my ostomy. Three people actually asked me about it. I was glad that at least a few people bothered to ask, it seemed to break the tension somewhat, at least for me. It did make me uncomfortable, allowing people I didn’t even know to see a part of me that I have been trying so hard to hide these past nine years, but I was on a mission, and wasn’t going to let that get in my way. 

The three categories that I entered in this contest were: 1) Men’s over 35, 2) Novice Heavyweight and 3) Open Heavyweight. “Novice” means it was the first time I had entered a contest. “Heavyweight” is a weight class, which means that I weighed more than 198 pounds. 

The first category I entered to come on stage for awards was the Over 35 category, I won the Second Place Trophy. The next was the Novice Heavyweight, and I won the First Place Trophy! The “Open” Heavyweight is typically where you find the biggest guys, and this category is always left for last. It’s like the bull-riders in a rodeo – that’s what everybody wants to see the most, the big bulls, so that’s always the last event at a rodeo. There were four of us, and the other three were considerably larger than I am. In fact, the biggest guy weighed fifty pounds more than me, and was about 4 inches taller than me! However, I was more defined than they were, which tipped the scale in my favor. I won First Place in the Open Heavyweight category!

By this point in the competition, I had already been on stage about fifteen times. Every time you’re on stage, you keep your entire body flexed – you tighten all of your muscles, for the whole time that you are on stage. This is not an easy thing to do! After doing this so many times throughout the day, I was exhausted. Also, throughout the entire day, I had been covered with a coat of oil, to keep me shiny under the lights. The oil had been working away at the adhesive on my flange, and the top edge had come loose. The Stomahesive part of the flange was still stuck to me, just the paper bandage around the flange had come loose. I kept pressing it back against my abdomen, and it would come loose again a minute later. It was still okay.

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