Bronwyn Steck

I still thank fate – and Muhamad Ali – for that encounter! I was profoundly impressed, and I felt a strange need to touch him; to shake his hand; to know that he also existed in my reality, and not only in magazines and in the heads of the people who talked about him. Despite the crowd around him, I managed to get close enough to Muhamad Ali, as he headed towards the high school, to tap him on the shoulder very briefly. He, the greatest of the super athletes, the star par excellence, was really made of flesh and blood! But that encounter showed me something else too: so was I. That day motivated me incredibly. The very next day, I changed my sporting activities and enrolled in a wrestling group at my school, because there was no boxing, and by nature, wrestling is a man-to-man struggle, similar to boxing. I transferred my previous sporting experience, my discipline and my willingness to work hard at it, to wrestling, and in a little over a year, I improved in leaps and bounds, and that was just the beginning. Some time later, I suffered a bad injury, and I had to have reconstructive surgery to my right knee. During the period of rehabilitation in a medical facility, and after that, in the sparsely equipped gym at the high school, I didn't fully adhere to my doctor's instructions. I did exercise my legs and kept to the plan he had drawn up; but I also did workouts for the rest of my body – every day for several weeks. With a training program that, by today's standards, would be considered ludicrous, I gained about 8.8lb of muscle. The coach of our wrestling group noticed, of course, and he was pleased with the results. Thanks to his support, I was able to enter a real gym for the first time shortly afterwards, about a 20-minute car ride away. It was a relatively large center for that time, with a surface area of several hundred square meters, and it was very well maintained, with excellent equipment. Just entering that place filled me with pure enthusiasm! My trainer showed me the gym equipment and, for several hours, he allowed me to discover all kinds of things that I had never seen before. The next day we went back to the gym again. When we were almost finished with our training, I got a bit of a shock. The owner of the center summoned me to his office! I was scared. What did he want from me? Had I done something wrong? The boss had a deep, penetrating, yet clear voice. To my surprise, he said he thought I had talent, and he asked me, out of the blue, if I would like him to train me. What a surprise! Hastily, and very enthusiastically, I told him that I couldn't imagine anything more wonderful! Today, however, I must qualify that statement with a little smile, because I got to know a form of working with weights that impressed even someone like me, who'd already gotten accustomed to long, hard workouts at a young age. I trained six times a week. My leg training consisted of no less than three sessions a week of 10 sets of squats each. It wasn't just hard, it was grueling!