Her first trip to the weight room wasn’t exactly a case of love at first sight. In fact, as a burgeoning track star back in high school, time spent there was about as much fun as detention with a double dose of her least-favourite subject thrown in for bad measure.
Running she loved. Jumping was great. Combining the two was fantastic. Pumping iron? She would’ve rather run a 1,500 with a screaming stitch in her side and silver-dollar-sized blisters on both feet.
“I never thought I would be a weightlifter,” Lacey Van Der Marel laughs.
At the risk of giving away the end of the story, today the 28-year-old Stoney Creek native is a powerful, muscular, iron-heaving package of fast-twitch muscles who’s strong enough to lift a newborn elephant over her head. A hard-core athlete with Olympic dreams.
If that seems like an unlikely outcome, the route she took to get here is even more unusual. And wildly circuitous.
“I’ve done a lot,” she says.
Van Der Marel was three when she started gymnastics. She excelled at it all the way through high school at Orchard Park. What she did there built her strength and helped her become explosive. So when she decided to dabble in track and field — long jump, triple jump and hurdles — her body was ideal for the sport.
Naturally, she was good at it. So good that she won six Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations (OFSAA) medals.
By the time she got to Western University, she’d upped her game a step further and increased the degree of difficulty by competing in the pentathlon. Eventually, though, she found herself needing a new challenge.
She stumbled upon CrossFit, a multi-event series of strength and endurance challenges in which the ultimate goal is to push your body so hard you wish you’d never been born. Of course, the folks in the increasingly popular sport, who describe their champions as the fittest people alive, describe it slightly less ominously. But when Van Der Marel saw an event for the first time, she was blown away.
“I remember thinking, ‘These people are crazy,'” she says.
So of course she wanted to do it.
In her first competition she finished third-last. She went back to the gym and worked harder until she climbed to third place in the regionals, beaten only by the woman who went on to win the world championship and the woman who came fourth at the same competition. Van Der Marel loved the sport so much she opened a CrossFit gym with her husband Jay Rhodes.
Now in unbelievable shape, she dabbled in Fitness, a competition in which athletes perform on stage and are judged on their physique, strength and flexibility.
“I only did a couple,” the substitute teacher laughs.
In fact, she was in such good shape already, she didn’t really even train specifically for that. Just showed up and competed. And won a first-place trophy.
Somewhere along the way, the woman who hated the weight room once upon a time had grown to love it. The years had turned her into a bit of a lifting buff. So as she looked for her next challenge, she turned toward pure power.
Watching the world weightlifting championships on her phone a year ago, she didn’t think she could qualify for the 2015 event in time. Yet in the span of 12 gruelling months — training two to three hours most days after teaching — she did. Not only did she earn a spot, but with a lift of 88 kilograms, she broke the Ontario record for the snatch (in which the lifter takes the barbell from the floor to an overhead position in a single motion) along the way.
The 5-foot-5, 130-pound lifter also set a goal of qualifying for the Pan Am Games back when she started.
“I actually came pretty close,” she says. “I was the alternate.”
Now the sixth-ranked Canadian — though first in her weight class — is taking her best shot at qualifying for the Olympics. She leaves in a few weeks for the worlds in Texas which are a qualifier for Rio. Not to mention her first international event.
Do well there and her next stop on her unlikely sporting storyline may involve wearing her wearing a completely new set of gear. This one covered in a Maple Leaf.
Courtesy of: The Hamilton Spectator