The 38-year-old was largely unfamiliar with her sport five years ago. Now she is one of the strongest people on the planet
he Chiseled Life gym in Columbia, Maryland, is buzzing with a soundtrack of weights clanging and lifters grunting. Then Tamara Walcott paces in front of the deadlift bar and the room stills. The men by the bench bar stop and turn, ready to see a world-record holder in action.
A self-described “food addict,” Walcott was in the middle of her divorce in 2017 when she found her weight ballooning. “I remember going through my divorce, crying in my closet, telling my sister, ‘I want to lose weight. I want to lose weight,’” she says. “And then I wanted to try it. I was able to take control of that. And I felt like everything else in my life started to have order. So people see this exterior change and think it’s great. But if they could truly tap into my mental [state] in the way that I think now, that I look at my body – like your body is your vessel, take care of your body, it’s only one you got – it’s like a [180 degree] change from how I used to think.
“When I got divorced, I didn’t know how I was going to make ends meet having gone from two incomes to one,” she says. But her grandmother, who worked as a cook in the Virgin Islands and whom Walcott, her siblings, and mother lived with growing up, had shown her it could be done, and with generosity too. “We didn’t have a lot,” she says, but her grandmother would regularly cook giant pots of food and feed the neighborhood. “I never felt like I was missing anything growing up. I always felt loved.
Going into the Arnold Sports Festival was one of those times. She ticked off the reasons not to go: She had just done a competition, she would be a powerlifter competing in a strongman competition, and she had never lifted the“I’m going to embarrass all the power lifters, all the strong women are gonna laugh at me,” she remembers thinking. “Every competition, I’m always like, it’s my last. I’m not gonna do another one, this is my last competition.
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