A weighty story ... for three women

ROHNERT PARK – Tuesday I asked three women how much they weighed. Tuesday I flinched three times. Weight can be a touchy subject for women, a topic many men find fraught with peril.

"Don't Ask And I Won't Tell You Anyway And You're Lucky I Don't Snap Your Pencil Neck!" very often is the assumed response after a man who for some inexplicable reason will ask a women how much she weighs.

Still, I had to do my job Tuesday so I asked these three women their weight.

Three times I kept my head down, just in case something might be flying through the air. I had no reason to worry. The sport of weightlifting, of all things, renders such a social faux pas irrelevant.

"We have to deal with weight every time we compete," Kelly Reinhart said. "We have to talk about our weight. We are competing in weight classes. It becomes no big deal."

Reinhart didn't blink when she told me her weight, 128. I blinked, however, as Reinhart, Sara Flynn, Freddie and Niki Myles all claimed to be weightlifters. As they sat down on workout benches Tuesday I didn't see the stereotype.

Weightlifters have muscles on their ears and index fingers that can bench press 200 pounds. They have Popeye arms that look like sides of beef. And if you ever asked a weightlifter to touch his toes, he would wind up in traction, for a weightlifter bends as well as a wooden door. Right? If that was the case, then what was I looking at Tuesday? I mean, these four weightlifters have qualified and will travel to the U.S. Nationals which begins today in Peoria, Ill. If they are U.S.-caliber, their thighs should be rubbing together.

Instead, I saw the most amazing sight.

Normal, that's what I saw. Four people who looked like they took care of their bodies, like staying away from eating anything white. That kind of normal.

Healthy. Fit. Normal ears. Normal index fingers. The envious kind of Normal.

"I lost 30 pounds since I began lifting," Reinhart said. "When I came into this sport, the one thing I wanted to make sure of was not getting big. Look at Niki. She's tiny."

Niki Myles, 31, was holding her seven-month old boy, Desmond. If she was ever chubby from giving birth, Myles wasn't now. She was fit and that's the word that kept springing to mind as I looked at the four lifters: "Fit."

"We get confused with bodybuilders," said Niki Myles, a Casa Grande graduate. "Our sport is about flexibility, technique, speed."

Myles is so accomplished at it she finished third in her weight class at the U.S. Nationals in 2007 and second in the nation in 2008. It's Olympic-style competition at the Nationals. Meaning, the snatch and the clean-and-jerk are the only two events scheduled, the same two events used to qualify and compete in the Olympic Games. The combined lifted weight of the two events results in the final placement.

Myles, at 5-foot-3, 120 pounds, has lifted a combined 367 pounds. Her husband Freddie, 5-foot-10, 198 pounds, has lifted 485 pounds. Sara Flynn, 5-foot-4, 135 pounds, has lifted 352 pounds. Reinhart, at 128, lifted 300. All weight totals have qualified each lifter for Nationals.

Each lifter came to the sport from different angles, for different reasons.

Freddie Myles, 33, started to weight-lift as a means to improve his speed in the 400 meters at Santa Rosa Junior College. Flynn, a gymnastics instructor, left that sport for the pain it inflicted. Reinhart, for example, ran marathons before she suffered a knee injury.

"You had to run 26.2 miles to realize how miserable you could be," said Reinhart, a bookkeeper who would like to own a coffee shop. "But I wanted to compete and I was curious about weightlifting." Even when it presented an apparent drawback to Reinhart.

"I could arm-wrestle a five-year old," she said, "and the five-year old would win."

How Reinhart could get past that projected incongruity – I'm gonna be a weak weightlifter – describes quite possibly the most healthy aspect of the sport.

Olympic-style weightlifters balance what typically are conflicting attitudes for athletes. They are competitive but aren't jealous of others. Leave the smack talking for other sports. The competition is internal, not external.

"We're here to support each other," Niki Myles said.

And they do so experiencing the joy most common to all sports.

"After a stressful day," Reinhart said, "you can always take it out on the weights. It takes your mind off everything."

Without, by the way, feeling like a whipped dog left out in the rain.

"When I was a competing gymnast," said Flynn, 24, "I was always sore. But I am rarely sore in weightlifting."

Weightlifting does suffer by its obvious association with bodybuilding, the connection being that barbells and dumbbells and straining muscles all have something in common to its users. They do, superficially.

So these four lifters are good sports about the na?e questions that come their way when others find out what they do.

"They ask me how much can I bench press," Niki Myles said.

There's no bench press in the Olympics.

"They ask me to flex for them," Reinhart said.

She usually flexes a smile.

For more on North Bay sports go to Bob Padecky's blog at padecky.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach Staff Columnist Bob Padecky at 521-5223 or bob.padecky@pressdemocrat.com.