Lisa Bickels
By Hans
May 2003
It's
Monday morning of May 5th. Just two days earlier, 24 year old Lisa Bickels
wins the overall at the 2003 Contra Costa in Northern California. She
takes a few minutes to speak on the phone about her recent win. Although
her voice sounds tired, her tone is very upbeat. "I worked my butt
off and trained hard," she says "but I felt that I came in with
good size and conditioning. I had a good feeling about (winning) the middle
weight, but the overall was definatly up for grabs. Shelly Fields (the
heavyweight winner) had the size, but I felt I was better conditioned.
In the end, it was all up to the judges."
But let's go back
a few weeks.
Anyone who has ever
spent time around a bodybuilder getting ready for a show knows that they
tend to develop tunnel vision before a contest. As they count down the
weeks, they put everything else on hold, block out any distractions, and
focus 100% on looking as close to perfection as possible the day of the
show.
But for Lisa Bickels,
things are little more complicated.
Lisa had just started
her pre-contest diet. But as a U.S. Marine Reserve, she could have been
called up at any time to serve in the War on Terrorism. That means that
at 48 hours' notice, she could have been en route to the Middle East.
But Lisa stayed focused
on the job of getting in contest shape. "Most of my friends had all
gone overseas so sometimes I felt as if I'm next," she says. "But
I trained as if it was not going to happen. I only focused on it if I
did get called up."
Lisa Marie Bickels
grew up in Fort Collins, Colo., the daughter of a Marine who served in
Vietnam. As a girl, she played volleyball, basketball and softball and
ran track, as well as riding four-wheelers, snowmobiles, and jet ski-ing.
"I was the kid who liked to push the limits," she says. In tenth
grade, she started lifting weights to increase her strength for sports.
"Right away people were amazed with how much I could lift,"
she says. "I was naturally a strong girl and I was able to build
muscle quickly."
At the age of 17,
Lisa decided to follow her father into the Marines. "I wanted a challenge
and that seemed like a good one," she says. She went to boot camp
in Parris Island, S.C., where all female Marine recruits are trained in
exactly the same way as the men, but separately. The notorious Marines
boot camp is the longest and most intense boot camp of all the branches
of the military. But Lisa breezed through it. "Boot camp was more
of a mental challenge for me than physical," she says. "Physically,
it wasn't very tough. I even lost some of my size, because we ran all
the time and of course there were no weights."
After boot camp, Lisa
was stationed at Camp Pendleton, one of the biggest Marine Corps bases
and the home of the 1st Marine Division, just outside San Diego. She spent
three years there and reached the rank of Corporal in an artillery battalion
of the 11th Marines. She quickly got used to be in a largely male environment
(women make up 6% of the Marines). "Being a woman in the Marines
can be tough if you let it," she says. "I chose not to let it.
I had the mentality that I had to do twice as good as the men to be thought
half as good." But she admits that becoming a "leatherneck"
(so called because of the leather collar on the Marines' original uniform)
changed her a lot. "It made me grow up really fast and made me a
tougher person because you have to have a thick skin in there and not
let harsh words get to you."
It was while she was
in the Marines that Lisa started thinking about competitive bodybuilding.
She had done bench press contests while she was in the Marines ("I
won every one that I entered," she says), and the Marines she worked
out with were always trying to talk her into getting into bodybuilding.
In December 2001, once she was off active duty, she began actively training
for shows with the help of two Marine Master Sergeants. In her first year,
she won the Novice heavyweights at the 2002 Border States Classic and
the Novice Heavyweight and overall, along with first in the Open Middleweights
at the Tournament of Champions in 2002.
At
24 years-old, Lisa has a great future in bodybuilding ahead of her. At
5-foot-3, she currently weighs in at 127 pounds in contest shape and 135
in the off-season. She says she wants to put on some more size, particularly
in her hamstrings and calves. "I know I have the genetics to get
me there," she says. Her inspiration is Ms. Olympia Lenda Murray.
"I always had a dream of sculpting my physique like that and now
I am just tapping into my potential."
With a few months
left on reserve, Lisa works part-time at a Maxmuscle store in Oceanside,
Calif., and plans to go to college to learn physical therapy and acupuncture.
Although she is no longer on active service, her ties to the Marines remain
strong, and she still trains at the gym on the base at Camp Pendleton.
But whether or not she is called on to serve her country again, Lisa will
be making a splash in bodybuilding some time soon. "Once you have
been in the Marines you have a strong sense that you can do anything,"
she says.
Lisa's
E-mail for Fans to write is lisamariebickels@hotmail.com
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