WRITTEN BY RICHARD SEVEN

	At age 50, Pamela Beaty was new to figure competition and says it's the scariest thing she's ever done.
	Bellevue fitness pro Tanji Johnson knows how to pose and move to get the attention of judges in competitions.

FITNESS PRO Tanji Johnson and I sat on a bench in a weight room in the back of Bellevue's Max Muscle. We thumbed through photographs of statuesque fitness competitors frozen in awkward poses to accentuate symmetry, curves and evidence of hard work.

The 21st Emerald Cup Championship, the nation's largest amateur fitness, figure and body-building competition, was just a week away, and she was nice enough to donate time to teach a neophyte like me Fitness-Figure Competition 101. She tapped a finger on a particularly nice pose or on a spot of imperfection. "You see the difference here?" she asked. "Uh huh," I fibbed.

Johnson is 28, bright-eyed and motivated. She has a clear sense of herself and would answer my questions in perfect detail before I finished asking them. She is so bright, or perhaps I was so clueless, that she finally rose to her feet to give me a three-dimensional demonstration. She positioned her 5-foot-3, 112-pound frame directly in front of me, standing erect, shoulders high, back stiff, arms pointed straight down. An Air Force veteran, she seemed to be at attention.

"Now watch," she said. In a snap, she had flexed her upper back muscles as dramatically as a cobra fans before a strike. She morphed from fit to imposing — at 5 foot 3. It sort of freaked me out, but I got the point. Then she flowed into a quarter turn, directing my eyes to the angles and purpose of her side presentation. Then, she turned her back and told me to view her backside before and after a flex.

Johnson, employed and sponsored by Max Muscle, coached some local Emerald Cup competitors on the perfect pose: shoulder back, front leg at just the right angle, a personality showing behind those walls of teeth. One of those seeking tips was Pamela Beaty, a 50-year-old businesswoman.

Friday night at The Emerald Cup — my first exposure to the sport of fitness and figure competitions — I trolled the booths dominated by high-octane powders, power juices, health bars and heavily muscled people intently talking proteins and carbs. Other vendors sold everything from teeth whitening to aphrodisiacs.

The fitness competition struck me as an amalgam of gymnastics, aerobics, cheerleading and performance. They twirled and flipped and fell and danced and smiled, all choreographed to upbeat music.

The figure competition is a relatively new category to accommodate fitness physiques that lacked the athleticism, and it attracted perhaps triple the number of entrants. Some would call it a beauty pageant.

In the over-35 field, 14 bikini-clad women padded one by one on the stage before lining up. The judges would call a few to the front of the stage to eyeball, analyze and compare them.

Beaty was up there in the glare, in her second figure competition ever — and the second in two weeks. As I watched the contestants straining to keep the optimal pose, grins frozen on faces, I wondered more than ever why. Beaty placed second to last in her first competition and didn't even check to see how she did in this one. It was beside the point, she told me.

"I've done a lot of things that have scared me, like singing opera," she said, "but I've never been so terrified as I was up there. Before I tried it I always looked at these competitions as a bit of a freak show, but I had to fight fears and preconceived notions. It was most educational."

Her sojourn began as she trained for a triathlon. Her trainer suggested she try the fitness competition. She jumped into it, but several months into the training, he abandoned her. She continued, worked with Max Muscle, exercised constantly and followed the bizarre eating patterns of a fitness competitor. She bulked to 142 by increasing calories and building muscle. By building up, she was ready to diet, losing fat but retaining muscle. She wound up at 115.

As competition day neared, she had cut body fat from 24 to 10 percent. She drank two gallons of distilled water a day and followed instructions, such as waking at 4 a.m. to eat. She shelled out $700 for a pair of swimsuits and painted herself with tanning dye as all competitors do, stood on 5-inch heels — all for 30 minutes on stage to be judged.

"It was a psychological roller-coaster," she said. "Once I was well into it, I started hearing horror stories about what going through something like this can do to you. But it was good for ridding vices. Just drinking more water and no sugar has been good. Getting up there on stage, getting judged whether you're Grade A or top sirloin, is so strange. You feel naked, but it does peel away some insecurity."

If you jump off a cliff, you feel the rush and then it's over, she said. "This is just a long, long process, and you have to stay with it until the end."

Richard Seven is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff reporter.

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