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this Issue of Curve:
10-6
All-American Girls
It’s a fair bet you won’t see the women profiled here staring out at you from a Wheaties box or the cover of Sports Illustrated, but you might spot them at your local gym. These buff, brave, determined women are amateur athletes who have spent hours building their own definition of greatness — without ever getting paid for a drop of sweat.
They’re amateurs, yes, but there’s nothing inexperienced about them. Contrary to the myth that older women don’t play sports, these Amazons all happen to be over 30. They played other games and pursued other interests before taking up the sport they practice today with such fervor. Whether surfing, powerlifting, or leading the pack in flag football or rugby, each has her own story of self-discovery — and all the wonderful things that can happen when you test unfamiliar waters and then jump in head first, leaving your doubts far, far behind. — Kristin Egener
POWER LIFTING: Strength Within
By C.L. Martin
If some people still consider women to be the weaker sex, Michele Lee Carlson is out to blast that myth with her rapidly rising status in the sport of powerlifting.
“The gift that I was given was my strength,” admits Carlson. At 5 feet 5 1/2 inches and 200 pounds of muscle, 31-year-old Carlson has been putting that strength to work. She has already taken first place in the open weight class at the Denver USA Powerlifting Competition, and is confident that she will soon become a nationally ranked lifter.
Yet it was just over a year ago that Carlson was only a spectator at powerlifting events. At 400 pounds, she thought she was too heavy to participate. Her friend Steve insisted that the only way to get over that was to “just go up there and do it.” So she did, and discovered not only her strength for lifting, but also a strength within herself.
“In the past I had been so scared about how people would judge me because the world is so much about how you look,” Carlson says. “Powerlifting isn’t about that. It’s about how much you can lift.”
After she got past her fear of wearing a singlet, the one-piece uniform usually worn over a T-shirt, Carlson impressed her coach by earning high numbers in her first competition. Her form was excellent and her technique was perfect as she performed the “Holy Trinity” of powerlifting: the deadlift, squat and bench press.
Powerlifting is about strength and lifting with slow, controlled movements while concentrating on form and technique. The deadlift starts with the weight on the ground. The powerlifter squats down and lifts the weight waist-high while returning to standing position. Knees and back are totally straight as the weight is held for about three seconds. The squat begins with the powerlifter standing and the weight resting on her shoulders. The powerlifter then squats down in a deep knee bend and returns to standing. The bench press is done with the powerlifter on her back. The weight is lifted at arm’s length above the chest, lowered to the chest and then pressed out at arm’s length again. These lifts must be done in perfect form or the competitor will be disqualified after making three mistakes.
During competition, powerlifters can use squat and deadlift suits. Special shoes and wraps can give them a competitive edge. Carlson forgoes these tools in favor of lifting “raw.”
It’s a strategy that doesn’t seem to be doing Carlson any harm as she gets closer to breaking the Colorado state records for both the bench press and squat. Soon, however, Carlson will leave powerlifting to pursue her goal of competing as an out athlete in women’s weightlifting for the 2004 Olympics. She says that her powerlifting is helping her build the strength she will need, but weightlifting takes more concentration, technique and better form. The main difference between the two sports is that weightlifters “throw” the weights and bring them over their heads with quick movements, while powerlifters lift the weights only to their waist and use slower movements.
Carlson trains with her coach three days a week for powerlifting and does her own workout six days a week. She takes supplements such as calcium for strong bones and glucosamine for joint support, but she can’t take things like cold medicine because they could disqualify her from competition. The only problem so far, claims Carlson, is her addiction to cardio workouts. She likes to do aerobics, even though her coach warns her not to do cardio near competition time because it takes away from the strength she should be reserving.
“You can either be an aerobics bunny, or you can be a powerlifter. Which one do you want to be?” asks her coach.
Clearly, for Carlson, powerlifting wins hands down. “It’s like therapy within itself, and you don’t have to pay anybody to go do it,” she says.
SURFING: Surf’s Up
By Pam Huwig
Ask most any athletic woman why she loves her sport, and she’ll undoubtedly say that, in some way, it’s a love affair, an intimacy experienced only during her game. Top-notch surfer Jane McKenzie is no exception.
The Santa Cruz, Calif., native has been surfing for nearly 40 years. “It’s a respectful thing that I do when I go into the ocean,” she explains. “It’s a chance to get away from everything — to mingle with an element to which you were actually born.”
While Santa Cruz has always been home, her family moved to Hawaii when she was 8 — which is when her tiny feet first stepped onto a surfboard. Her dad was an avid swimmer and loved the water so much that the family lived on a boat for a time.
“We had a surfboard on the back of the boat and he’d toss it in the water for me because I was too little to carry it,” she says. “I’ll never forget the feeling of first standing up on my board. Nothing compares to that adrenaline rush.”
After her parents divorced, McKenzie moved back to Santa Cruz with her mother and siblings. There, she began surfing almost obsessively. When her mom finally realized that it wasn’t just a phase, she finally sprang for a wetsuit.
“When I was 13 or 14, one of the local doctors in town … tucked me under his wing and took me around to all of the surfing events,” McKenzie remembers. “It was really nomadic for a while, but my mom didn’t worry too much because she knew, or thought she knew, that I wasn’t getting into any trouble.
“You see different things when you’re on or in the ocean than you do from the beach or standing up on some cliffs watching,” she says. “All your senses are alive when you’re in it. If you have the fortune to catch a wave, then stand up on a surfboard for it, and dance with this wave a little bit … there’s speed that goes with it, lightness, agility, you can feel the G-forces, you can feel the surface tension … there’s a of physics involved that a lot of people don’t think about.”
Known as the “Sport of Kings” in Hawaii, surfing, like most sports, was once considered a “men-only” activity. Yet, like in so many sports today, women are no longer strangers to the surf.
“I just don’t think it matters if you’re a man or a woman,” McKenzie says. “There are some men who are jerks because women are out there, but there are also some women who are jerks too.”
Although at one time she competed in every surfing event she could get her board to, and became a regular at the esteemed O’Neill Coldwater Classic and the Santa Cruz Longboard Union Club Invitational, she says that becoming a parent has changed her priorities some. (McKenzie and her partner have a 6-month-old son.) While she still competes regularly, she has limited her schedule to events along the California coast.
“I don’t always get first place, but I like to,” she says. “If I can just surf as well as I can in whatever conditions there are, I’m happy. I’m too old to beat myself up about those kinds of things. Nor do I have time to really practice like a lot of the other women — they’re either much younger, and/or don’t have home commitments.
“But I do have a fat ego to think about,” she jokes.
FOOTBALL: Natural Leader
By Kristin Egener
“I never played one of the glory positions,” says Dee Casta, alluding to her 11-year stint as a flag football player. “Those were always for the quick and the young — I was just the ‘smart and the wily.’”
Though she might not get the glory, Casta certainly gets respect. At 48, a veteran of various softball, tennis, field hockey, basketball, rugby and flag football teams, she’s been playing sports almost continuously since she was 9 years old. Her younger teammates impudently call her “Deeno the Dinosaur,” but they also regard her as the “natural leader” of the Wizards, the Massapequa, N.Y., flag football team she helped to form. “They think I know more than I do,” she explains, then adds craftily, “I don’t let them know that I don’t.”
In her years as a center, defensive tackle, coach and sometime-quarterback with the Wizards, Casta set an example by maintaining both her focus and her sense of fun when the going got tough. The first year the Wizards played, “we won one game,” Casta admits. “But when we won that game, you would’ve thought we’d won the championship. We had champagne, and we celebrated all over the place.”
“Because we had so much fun, other players from other teams started to join us, so that our talent base began to grow,” she says. “And then we ended up not coming in last anymore.”
Retired from flag football since a bad knee injury in 1996, Casta says the best success story has been the story of women’s sports in general. When she graduated from high school in 1970, there were no athletic scholarships awarded to the women in her class.
The picture looks much brighter for Casta’s athletic niece, who has received numerous awards from schools and various sports organizations.
Casta wastes no energy pining over the opportunities she herself didn’t have, preferring instead to see herself as part of a pioneering generation. “I encourage all [female] players not to give up on their dreams, ever,” she says earnestly, “because if I’d given up on my dreams of playing, my niece wouldn’t be competing right now.”
RUGBY: A Guided Missile
By Kristin Egener
A bit soft-spoken and reticent to begin with, Mona Rayside quickly gathers momentum once you get her talking. Apparently that’s her style as an athlete, too. A “shy, short fat kid growing up,” the 30-year-old rugby player now describes herself as a “guided missile” on the field, “a single-minded type [who] will track people down and knock the crap out of them” — in a nice way, of course.
Although rugby has been famously dubbed “the barbarian’s sport played by gentlemen,” it started attracting ladies in the mid-1970s and now rivals softball for popularity among dykes. For Rayside, who has been playing since 1991, the allure of this gloriously muddy, rough-and-tumble game lies in its valuation of female power. “When I started playing, it was a revelation, because all of a sudden people were excited to see a big ol’ girl come on the field,” she recalls, a smile in her voice. “Rugby … helped me recognize and find my own strength, and to realize that I was physically strong and that that was something to be desired.
“In a lot of instances, especially for women, there’s this sense that it’s not good to be too strong, it’s not attractive. … But [in] rugby culture, the values that are prized are different and the qualities that are praised are different.”
Rayside herself got schooled in those demanding values when she moved from the Midwest to the Washington, D.C., area and began playing for the Maryland Stingers, one of the top women’s club teams in the nation. “My first few years with the Stingers were actually a big blow to my ego, because I became painfully aware of just how little I knew,” she says, laughing. Since then, however, her skills have taken a big leap forward, and her rugby résumé now includes a tour of New Zealand with the Eagles — that’s the women’s national team — and participation in several elite Eagles training camps.
But even for the most successful players, rugby is often a wild and bumpy ride — literally. Given the relatively small number of teams, Rayside explains, “ruggers” have to travel a lot, and women in particular “end up having to pay for a lot of stuff out of pocket.” She says, only half joking, “Once we suck [a new player] in and say, ‘Come out and play!’ the next part always is, ‘You got a car? Mind going on a 14-hour road trip?’” The reaction of the rookies varies. “We’ve had a lot of players who were good, but they just couldn’t afford to finance it. And then we’ve had other players who’ve been like, ‘Yeah, I hocked my car, I sold my girlfriend. … ’
“Basically, they have to be willing to pay a great deal of money to drive or fly somewhere to a new place, to meet new people so that those new people can throw them on the ground violently.”
For a true devotee, these hardships are just part of her love affair with the sport. Rayside knew she was hooked during one game early in her career, when she caught the ball and saw that she had a wide-open field. “The sun was shining, and it was such a green field and a blue sky and I caught the ball and I was running so fast … you know, this shy, fat kid from Brooklyn just running as fast as my legs could carry me. It was a moment of freedom and clarity, and a recognition that I want to know more, I want to come here again.”
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