The Chiseled Life gym in Columbia, Maryland vibrates to a soundtrack of clanging weights and grunting lifters. Then Tamara Walcott walks in front of the deadlift bar and the room goes still. The men by the bench’s bar stop and turn, ready to watch the world record holder in action.
Walcott looks toward the bar and gets one foot into position, kicks the other out, bringing it up to hip height. He waves one doll in front of her, and then the other, showing off her long nails, painted yellow, with a different design on each finger. Holding a squat briefly, he then stands up and bends over to grab the bar. She starts to pull. “Go!” the men shout. “Go!” yells a woman leaning against the squat rack. Walcott pauses with the 455-pound load on her shins before lifting it up to her hip level. He lowers the bar back down…then repeats the movement five more times.
Walcott is done with his first heavy lift of the day and begins to remove his wrist wraps. Gym goers go back to their own weights; grunting and resuming conversation. Your accountability partner registers my surprise and laughs. “Everyone stops to watch Tamara lift weights,” she says.
Walcott, to put it mildly, is strong. The 38-year-old mother of two set a world record for female deadlift at the Arnold Sports Festival earlier this month, lifting 641 lb (290 kg), or about the weight of an average-sized grizzly bear. He broke a record he had set the year before in style: his distinctive grooming, along with his immaculate fingernails and earrings big enough to be worn as bracelets, caught the attention of both casual and professional sports fans. . But the professional weightlifter remembers a time when going up and down stairs to do laundry would have been impossible, let alone lifting hundreds of pounds.
Walcott, a self-described “food addict,” was in the midst of her divorce in 2017 when she found her weight skyrocketing. “I remember going through my divorce, crying in my closet and telling my sister, ‘I want to lose weight. I want to lose weight,’” she says.
“He weighed 415 pounds. There are literal moments where she would buy an outfit, and I think that’s how I realized that I was getting too big, I had to buy new clothes. And I say, I just bought this, why doesn’t it fit me? And I was going to try on something I wore the week before, and it was tight.”
Stepping back into a gym was daunting. Her sister, in one of those conversations from the closet in 2017, told her: “Tammy, I’ll come with you.”
“And he would literally drive 45 minutes three days a week after work to come with me and start training when I was at my highest weight,” says Walcott. On the nights she worked out, Walcott would leave her 9-5 job as a residential property manager, she’d make sure her kids were in bed, and she’d head to the gym, leaving her kids behind. care of her mother.
He tackled his food addiction with a new one: exercise. Whenever she felt like eating after a meal, “the new Tamara she would drop to the ground and do push-ups, sit-ups and jumping jacks. Now I am tired. I’m like, ‘Girl, sit down, you’re not hungry. Are you tired'”. She laughs. “I’m still a food addict, but I don’t indulge in those things anymore.”
Walcott had taken dumbbell classes before, but it wasn’t until he entered a new gym in 2018 that he was introduced to powerlifting. “I saw all these people lifting, there is chalk everywhere. I’m like, what’s going on? Why are these people screaming? she says, laughing.
“And then I wanted to try it. I was able to take control of that. And I felt that everything else in my life began to have order. So people see this exterior change and think it’s great. But if they could really tap into my mind [state] in the way I think now, that I look at my body, as if your body is your container, take care of your body, it’s just one you have, it’s like a [180 degree] change from how I used to think.”
Walcott lost 100 pounds in a year. His lifting took off. After working with his trainer, Daniel Fox, for less than a year, he went to his first powerlifting competition in late 2018.
“When I started out, we heard a lot of things like, ‘Why do you want to lift? Like, ‘You’re not going to lose lifting weights.’ But I did it. ‘You shouldn’t go to the bank, you’re going to look like a man.’ But not me. People have even asked me online, like, ‘Are you a man? Are you really a woman or are you a man?’ She gave birth to two children. I’m a woman. Why can’t I be strong? Why do you have to ask me those questions because I’m strong? You know what I want to say? So it’s kind of bringing awareness to other women and other girls that it’s okay to be strong because there are other people like you, other women like me who are doing that as well.”
She remembers showing her first medal to her grandmother, the matriarch of her family who had fallen ill and was in hospice in Maryland. The first time Walcott mentions her grandmother, who has since passed away, emotion creeps into her voice and her eyes fill with tears.
“When I got divorced, I didn’t know how I was going to make ends meet after going from two incomes to one,” she says. But her grandmother, who worked as a cook in the Virgin Islands and with whom Walcott, his siblings and his mother lived growing up, had shown her that it could be done, and with generosity, too. “We didn’t have much,” she says, but her grandmother used to cook giant pots of food and feed the neighborhood. “I never felt like I was missing something growing up. I always felt loved.”
“When I’m deadlifting, I think about her,” he says. “When she stopped being able to walk, not all of us knew how to use [the lift to get her out of bed], and she did not feel safe and secure. Then one day I said, ‘Grandma, I’ve got you,’ and I picked her up and put her in her chair or I picked her up and put her back in her bed. And she used to say, ‘Oh my God, you lifted all this weight. Now you are picking me up, you, my human crane.’”
For a woman who exudes confidence, Walcott says she’s not immune to self-doubt. In fact, her achievements were preceded by her.
“I sit and dive in and I feel like, I can feel hurt in the moment. But I don’t stay there long. That’s what my grandmother used to say all the time: ‘Tammy, your current situation is not your final destination,’” she says. “So there are days when I feel tired. There are days when I feel emotionally touched. There are days when I don’t want to go to the gym, but I know I’m not going to feel like this forever.”
Going to the Arnold Sports Festival was one of those moments. She listed the reasons for not going: she had just done a competition, she would be a weightlifter competing in a strongman competition, and she had never lifted the elephant barwhich is about two and a half feet longer and bends more than a regular deadlift bar.
“I’m going to put all the weightlifters to shame, all the strong women will laugh at me,” he remembers thinking. “In every competition, I always say, it is the last one. I’m not going to do another one, this is my last competition.”
On the day of her event, Walcott wore red pants to celebrate Women’s History Month and donned large gold earrings. He showed off his red painted nails in his signature configuration. When he wrapped her fingers around the elephant bar, it was the first time he had touched her. “Have you ever done the pencil trick where you move the pencil and it looks wobbly? This is what the elephant bar feels like. When you pick it up, the weights bounce up and down, pushing you toward the ground.” He lifted 576 lbs. Then he got 626.
I ask him what he was thinking. “Walking to the bar, I am thinking about my children. I’m thinking of my grandmother, she was the matriarch of our family. And it’s just a lot of emotions running. So it’s almost like tunnel vision. I don’t hear the crowd. I don’t see anything. I see the bar. I don’t even see the weight on the bar. I just know that I have to pick it up, because I have to do that for her.
“I take my headphones off right before I go up because I don’t want to hear the announcer. I don’t want to listen to anyone else. I don’t want to hear how much weight is on the bar; I have a rough estimate of what my coach will put in there.” This time he couldn’t escape the announcer’s voice that irritated the crowd with how much he was about to lift: 641 pounds. “The announcer repeated it over and over again. He kept saying, ‘Come on guys,’ and I was like, ‘Lord, I don’t want to know that!’”
He then picked it up, holding it for a full second before letting it drop. “I looked up and finally saw that it was a good lift. I was like ‘Oh, thank God!’”
“It felt light. He definitely had more in the tank. Definitely,” he says, laughing at my reaction. “Yeah I know. That’s crazy, right? It’s not like it’s impossible because I got 650[lbs] I’m already in the gym, that’s how I know I have more in the tank.”
Walcott is looking to break 650 pounds in competition later this year, though he won’t tell me how much. She reveals that in 2022 she has her eyes on powerlifter April Mathis’ squat, total and bench records, set 11 years ago. “So I’m chasing legends right now,” she tells me. “I haven’t reached my ceiling yet.”
