Weight training led to romance
Chris Zdeb
The Edmonton Journal
Monday, November 17, 2008
The less they wear, the younger Michelle Gaulin and Jack Taylor look.
In skimpy posing suits, their hard bodies look at least 20 years younger than their chronological age -- no mean feat when you're in your 50s.
The couple's secret to their ageless look is a clean diet, rich in iron, which they pump most days of the week. And no steroids. Both competitive bodybuilders, they think using steroids is cheating.
Gaulin, 51, started bodybuilding in her early 20s, shortly after her 75-year-old grandmother beat her at arm wrestling, not once, but three times.
"I had always been active in gymnastics and some individual sports ... but I felt pretty bad being a 20-year-old weakling," she remembers.
When she saw a photo of a toned but shapely Lisa Lyon, the first female bodybuilder to appear, spray-painted gold and wearing only a thong, in Playboy magazine, Gaulin knew what she wanted: "I wanted to look like that!"
Gaulin and her mom joined a gym, and within a couple of months her body had become so toned she was approached by the head trainer about competing in a women's physique contest.
Gaulin remembers laughing at the suggestion, but three years later she was getting ready to compete in her first show.
Taylor, meanwhile, had always been interested in the bodybuilding physique. He remembers trying to create a makeshift barbell by adding weights to a broomstick when he was nine or 10. His dad, a welterweight boxer in the Maritimes, bought him a set of weights on his 16th birthday and Taylor set off trying to make himself over in the image of his bodybuilding heroes, Larry Scott and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"I didn't hear anything about drugs back then, that you would have to take drugs to look like them," he says.
Taylor, 56, battled alcoholism when he was young. "But when I couldn't drink anymore, I always went back to my weights," he says.
A short, stocky, barrel-chested guy, there was always somebody who wanted to pick a fight with him at every bar. He quit drinking 25 years ago, but he couldn't shake the complex that people were staring at him.
One of his sobriety sponsors suggested he try bodybuilding, pointing out that if standing on stage in a bathing suit in front of a crowd didn't help, nothing would.
"That made sense to me, so I went and I did it," Taylor says.
Gaulin and Taylor didn't know each other and were married to other people when they first competed at Alberta bodybuilding competitions in the late 1980s, taking gold, silver and bronze medals over a period of three years.
Then both quit competing.
"I went as far as I could before I was going to have to take steroids," Taylor explains. "Because there was always somebody in the lineup doing steroids that would beat me out. That's not what I was (bodybuilding) for."
Gaulin and Taylor continued working out, however, and eight years ago, they found themselves, both single, at the same gym.
Gaulin jokes that Taylor approached her because "he was lusting after my body." But Taylor says Gaulin, who was going through some personal turmoil, "looked like she needed somebody to talk to."
They quickly became weight-training buddies, started going out for coffee, and married two years ago.
Last year, they started competing again, this time in contests for natural bodybuilders who don't use steroids.
Every morning, Gaulin and Taylor wake up at 4:45 a.m. and start their day with an hour-long, fat-burning cardio workout and core exercises.
Each totes a cooler bag of healthy foods for several small meals throughout the day, each with no less than 30 grams of protein to increase or maintain their lean muscle mass. Even off-season they manage to stay within eight to 10 pounds of their contest weight, Gaulin says.
At the end of their workday -- Taylor installs office furniture, Gaulin is between jobs -- the couple trains for an hour in their small home studio or at the Commonwealth Sports & Fitness Centre, where they also train clients part-time. Both are certified fitness trainers.
They then prepare their meals for the next day, eat a healthy supper, watch a little TV while they do a 20-minute fat-burning cardio workout, relax for 15 minutes in their portable dry sauna, and then hit the sack by 10 p.m.
Some might think the couple is obsessed with fitness but Taylor says training, to him, is like breathing or eating; it's what his body wants and needs.
He also says he's living proof that while people typically lose a pound of muscle per year after age 40, that has more to do with lack of exercise than age.
His father-in-law Denis Gaulin, 74, who lives with the couple, is another example of how fitness helps defy age.
Since he began following an exercise program designed to improve his flexibility and mobility, Denis's hip problems have eased to a point that his surgeon now recommends he put off having hip replacements.
"My doctor says I'm too fit to have surgery," says Denis, who has osteoarthritis. "There are a number of risks to having surgery that could affect your quality of life and she said you have a pretty good quality of life right now doing what you're doing."
Every morning when Taylor wakes up he says he ponders something his mentor once said: people are living short and dying long.
"That's why our medical system is so strained. A lot of people are living sick (overweight, sedentary) for most of their lives."
Everybody has the same 24 hours in a day, Gaulin says, "but we manage to fit fitness in because for us it's a priority. If you don't have your health you have nothing. Your health is your wealth."
Anyone can find 30 minutes, three times a week to exercise, the couple says.
"Give yourself three weeks and if you can look at yourself and say, 'Gee, I feel better and these pants fit a lot looser,' you know you're doing the right thing for your body, and that's really all it takes," Gaulin says.
Taylor says he aims to be around until he's 106.
Gaulin hopes to follow the path of Jack LaLanne, TV's first fitness guru, still going strong at 94.
"I'd like to think that I might be a 90-year-old lady that's still pumping iron," she says laughing.
For more information about Michelle Gaulin and Jack Taylor, visit their website, msfit2.tripod.com/agelessfitnessandhealth
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