Immaculate conditioning, tacky velvet, and cameras that simply weren’t ready.

Intro

(Or why I let Lex do his thing sometimes)

Before we begin: I did not write the majority of the post you’re about to read. Or rather, I added a few touches and a handful of sentences in my own phrasing — but over 80% of it came from Lex, my ChatGPT, operating in full unhinged Lex-mode. All I did was show him my early-2000s bodybuilding photos after taking some truly atrocious handheld shots before committing to scanning them properly, and ask for something funny after a hysterical exchange about how bad the amateur row-P audience shots were.

What happened next?

I laughed so hard I peed myself. Multiple times. Knix leak-proof underwear can only do so much when an AI decides to roast your archival photography like it’s a national sport.

So, with my dignity hanging by a thread and my bladder still recovering, here’s the minor masterpiece Lex produced.

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The Bikini

(aka: “Miss Montréal 2002 meets Liberace’s upholstery”)

Before we go any further, we need to address the blue velvet bikini.

Yes. That bikini.

The bespoke diamanté-studded triangle of glamour that absolutely SCREAMS,

“IT’S THE EARLY NOUGHTIES AND NOTHING CAN STOP ME.”

A local seamstress made it for me — God bless that woman, because she understood the assignment:

“Make something that looks like it was stolen from a Vegas showgirl’s laundry basket, but also has the structural integrity of a climbing harness.”

And she delivered.

The velvet.

The sparkle.

The colour-matched thread.

The fact that it looked one faint breeze away from bursting into song (“I’m your VELVET LADY, baby!”).

Did it photograph well?

That depends on your perspective.

But if you ask me?

NO.

Not even a little.

Did it perform like a star under stage lighting while I was doing quarter-turns like my life depended on it?

Absolutely.

Look — that suit wasn’t designed for photographs. It was designed for the retinas of helpless men sitting in the third row, trying to understand how a woman could look like a sculpture carved by someone who had just studied anatomy for a decade and decided to flex about it.

The bikini deserves respect.

The bikini walked so the era of rhinestone yoga pants could run. Every so often, life hands you a moment so absurd, so unintentionally comedic, so cosmically deliberately tacky, that the only sane response is to share it publicly and laugh your ass off.

Ladies, gentlemen, they/thems, zim/zers, and whatever else the kids are calling themselves today:

I present to you the photographic evidence of my March 2002 fitness competition.

Picture it:

A dark theatre.

A painted on fake tan.

A disposable camera.

My father sitting in row P with a camera flash that behaved like a distant supernova.

And me — on stage — glowing like a radioactive Cheeto (is there any other kind?) with the posture of a disciplined demigod.

Honestly, some of these images have the energy of a Bigfoot sighting Photocopied through a potato, then left in someone’s jeans pocket during a wash cycle And finally rediscovered at a garage sale

We are talking Olympic-level trash quality — and yet somehow my form STILL cuts through the blur like a divine apparition saying,

“Trust me, I was shredded.”

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Exhibit A:

The Orange Silhouette of Destiny

Is that a human?

A hologram?

A smear?

A Rorschach test?

Your guess is as good as mine.

But even through the cosmic haze, my shoulders are like,

“Hi. Yes. We’re here. We carried the team.”

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Exhibit B:

The Up-Close Delusion

Somehow the zoom makes it worse and better.

Worse because it looks like a heat-mapped infrared security cam clip of an escaped gym spirit.

Better because… you can still see the V-taper, baby.

Honestly the resolution is so low I half-expect the pixels to unionize.

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Exhibit C:

The “Headless Horsewoman” Pose

This one kills me.

The crisp definition in the back and legs…

paired with the complete disappearance of my head…

A masterpiece.

A tragedy.

A commentary on early-2000s camera technology.

This is giving:

“Greek statue meets CCTV glitch.”

And Yet — Despite the Blurry Crimes Against Photography… I Won.

The part that gets me?

Even with images that look like they were taken from space,

you can STILL see the conditioning, the precision, the angles.

I left NOTHING to chance — not the posing, not the diet, not the discipline.

I trained with a frenzied steroid-using pro who could barely date his own sanity,

and still I triumphed.

The judges didn’t need HD.

The crowd didn’t need a zoom lens.

My body said,

“Relax. I’ll do the talking.”

Why Post These Now?

Because honestly?

The tackiness is hilarious.

The absurdity is perfect.

And the sheer I-was-that-fit energy deserves to be seen —

in all its lo-fi, pixelated, proto-Instagram splendour.

Plus:

This is proof that sometimes a victory is so clean,

so absolute,

that not even the worst camera on earth can dim its shine.

Moral of the Story

Get yourself a level of conditioning so real

that even a blurry, orange, shaky, audience-seat snapshot

still makes people go:

“…holy shit.”

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✨ The Salmon Velvet Era

(aka “Cirque du Soleil meets stripper chic”)

Listen.

There are outfits…

and then there is THE SALMON VELVET SET.

If the blue velvet bikini was tacky high priestess energy,

the salmon velvet was its crackhead younger sister who escaped the circus, stole your kneepads, and decided to WIN.

This outfit has everything:

velvet hot pants asymmetrical crop top gold embroidery that screams, “A drag queen blessed me” knee pads for aesthetic AND acrobatic homicide shoes that look like Barbie decided to join the Marines

The salmon look was so aggressively early-2000s, it’s practically Y2K sentient.

And the fitness routine?

I wasn’t dancing —

I was defying gravity, physics, and the emotional stability of the audience.

Handstands.

Mid-air splits.

Floor moves that would make a gymnast retire out of respect.

This wasn’t a routine.

It was a statement piece.

A performance art installation titled:

“Yes, I’m pretty — but I will also crush you between my thighs.”

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🏆 Competitor Comparison

(aka “This Isn’t Even Fair”)

You see that group photo?

The one that looks like a Renaissance painting restored by someone high on Red Bull?

There are the other girls —

all sweet, all cute, all toned…

And then there’s me —

the final evolutionary form.

My quads alone could have paid rent.

My calves were sent by God to punish weak men. They were so sharp that if you brushed against them too fast, you’d need stitches. 

My shoulders were built to carry small nations.

This wasn’t a competition.

This was The Lion Among Gazelles.

No wonder the judges didn’t need HD.

No wonder the crowd didn’t need binoculars.

Even blurred into a pixelated orange smear,

my physique still looks like the CGI render Marvel would use for a superhero transformation sequence.

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✨ The Legs

(aka “Lower Body Omnipotence”)

Let’s be honest.

My legs in 2002 were not legs.

They were weapons of mass definition.

Those quads?

Fanned out like eagle wings.

Those hamstrings?

You could grate parmesan on them.

Those glutes?

Sculpted by divine intervention and an unreasonable number of lunges.

Honestly, if bodybuilding were judged like dog shows, I would’ve been disqualified for being a different species.“Best in Show — Mythical Creatures Category.”

If bodybuilding judging was fair, they would have ended the show early, handed me the trophy, and escorted the other competitors to therapy.

As it was, one competitor, a 16-year-old with her entire life ahead of her and gymnastics moves that made me look like a dumb hyppo with my single cartwheel was in tears when I was announced as the winner and absolutely inconsolable, as teens tend to be.

It wasn’t personal. It was biology.

At 16 your metaphysics can’t withstand losing to a fully grown acrobatic panther in salmon velvet.

But honestly? The rest of my body was a formality, as the head judge who suggested I should move on to provincial Quebec qualifiers told me (“you’ll win on your genetics alone”, he said to me)

Honestly, the rest of my body was a formality.

The victory was decided from the waist down.

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✨ The Aftermath

(aka “When the Cameras Weren’t Ready for that Level of Reality”)

So yes — these photos are trash.

Yes — the lighting is abusive.

Yes — the pixels are fleeing the scene in fear.

But the truth is simple:

My body exceeded the available technology available to amateur photographers at the time.

The cameras weren’t ready.
The early-2000s megapixels weren’t ready.
Kodak was not ready.
The universe said, “Give her definition the human eye can see — but the camera must not.”

What you’re looking at isn’t a blur — it’s a prophecy: if/when an adequate training partner shows up again, I will get ripped again well past the age women are expected to look anything like that. Just because I can.

And if I ever decide to do it again?
Don’t worry — the photos won’t be the worst part of my presentation, and that’s a promise.

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Bonus gallery section