ATHABASCA – A local couple added more hardware to their combined trophy case after Lorelei Sztym spent half-a-year training for her first bodybuilding contest since the Harper administration.
Sztym walked out of the 2024 CPA Northern Classic Naturals, held Oct. 27 in Grande Prairie, with a first-place finish in the woman’s figure 45-plus category, marking a triumphant return to the sport after a decade-long hiatus.
“I did a competition in 2012, and then it was my goal to do another figure competition before I turned 50,” said Sztym, who passed the half-century mark in July. “This competition came up and I decided to start training for it, so I only trained for maybe six months.”
The category Sztym competes in, figure prioritizes a look that is muscular but in a lean way. Sztym said it’s the middle category, between bikini — where competitors are judged on a thinner look — and bodybuilding, which focuses heavily on muscles and definition.
During her six-month-long regime, Sztym said she was in the gym five times a week, and was eating a diet that centred heavily around wild game — Lorelei and her husband Brian are both avid hunters, and much of her diet was harvested by the couple.
“A lot of it was venison that I had shot and killed myself, so that was a big part of it. There’s a lot of protein required,” said Sztym.
“I also ate a lot of fish that we caught from local lakes, so thank you to Lac La Biche and Calling Lake,” she added with a laugh.
While going to the gym five times a week might sound like some people’s personal hell, Sztym said it was considerably easier than the meal prep.
“That’s more time consuming, especially when I work full time. So the two jobs, plus training four to five times and the meal planning, it takes a lot of dedication.”
In the lead-up to her competition, Sztym cut everything but protein out of her diet, including the majority of her water intake. Five days away from the competition, snacking involved peanut butter from a jar, and 23 ounces of protein a day.
“Sometimes I couldn’t even consume all the allocated food for me that day. I definitely wasn’t hungry!” she said. “There’s no vegetables, no carbs, nothing. That’s the worst part of it, when all you get to eat is chicken and salmon and eggs.”
Competitive, but supportive
The Sztym’s are a busy couple — beyond Lorelei’s day job in an office, they run a construction company, and both compete at a national level in long-range F-Class rifle shooting.
“We’re very competitive when it comes to that, but we’re very supportive of each other us well,” said Lorelei. “I totally support all of his shooting competitions, yet he had to miss one to come to my bodybuilding competition. He’s very supportive of that, he’ll help me with my meals, if I say I need to go to the gym it’s ‘Yeah, no problem.’”
The co-competitors have gotten used to a hectic schedule — at least one family vacation has been spent in a small town for a shooting competition — and Lorelei said it occasionally required some outside-the-box planning.
“We went down to a competition this summer while I was training, and I was using boxes of bullets and whatever I had to do my training because we were just camping out at the range,” she said. “You gotta be versatile when you’re trying to do two things at once.”
Throughout the entire process, Lorelei said her husband’s support, alongside her co-workers and friends, helped get her through the event.
“I couldn’t have done this competition without all the support and encouragement,” she said.
“I thought I’d do okay, and was pleasantly surprised when I won, but Brian was fully confident that I was going to win. When I found out I was qualified for nationals it was even more exciting. He said, ‘We’re going, I don’t care what we have to do to get there, or if I have to miss something of mine, but we’re going.’”
Nationals will take place in Toronto next August, and Sztym said she’s looking forward to the experience.
“I'm excited to have the opportunity to go to Nationals in Toronto next August but also know how much hard work it's going to be to prepare for it.”
