Bodybuilder Gabrielle Nicander proves it takes more than muscles to be a champion
Spotting Gabrielle Nicander in a crowd is easy. Five-foot-nine and somewhere between her competition weight of 160 pounds and her off-season weight of 200 pounds, the 38-year-old “Gabe La Babe” has wild doll-like blonde hair, extremely full lips framing a wide mouth, intense and serious blue eyes, and muscles upon muscles upon muscles.
While it might seem like flirting with danger to begin an article about a powerful woman by disclosing both her age and weight, the second-most apparent thing about Nicander, once you’ve absorbed her appearance, is that her life is an open book. In the course of a single conversation, she divulged her steroid use, fetish wrestling income, extreme dieting techniques, deferred dreams, and sensitivity to the occasional mocking she receives as a ripped woman. Her candor has won her a recurring spot guest lecturing for Dr. Julie Betty’s pop culture class at UC Santa Cruz. What does she talk about?
Nicander fixes me with a stare. “Whatever I want.”
The last time she did it, she arrived in loose-fitting clothes, and upon being introduced, walked to the front of the lectern area and pulled her top off, then asked for first impressions. “The biggest one I get is ‘masculine’ because of my muscle,” she says. “So many times people have taken me off guard by asking if I’m a woman or a man.”
Her 8-year-old son Tevin, quietly playing a hand-held video game at her side, chimes in. “At Burger King, they call her sir.”
“That’s right. Because my voice is deep.” She does speak with an alto profundo, though one recognizably feminine—not so much a bearded man in a dress as a shapely woman in a coal miner’s suit. “I try to think of good comebacks, because otherwise I personalize it and my feelings get hurt. If my muscle means I’m a man, does higher fat in a man mean he’s a woman?”
Her sense of humor is the sort of deadpan sweetly-crude style that one might one might expect from a woman who’s learned to cope with mostly-male situations—Nicander did a stint in the Navy, has a master’s degree in physical education, works as a personal trainer at Gold’s Gym and Spa Fitness, and, of course, is a bodybuilder. On her personal site (gabelababe.com), this shut-your-trap humor is apparent in the frequently asked questions area. How much do you bench press? “YOU!! I can bench press you!” How long did it take you to look like this? “Two weeks.”
High Def Dame
In reality, it has been five years since Nicander made the commitment to bodybuilding as a source of income. Despite the relatively late start and short amount of time, she has achieved some success, and is gearing up for her second national show—the National Physique Committee’s 2007 USA Championships in Las Vegas. “Before I got serious with a trainer, my diet was terrible,” she says. “My ergogenic aid—anything you use to enhance fitness performance or increase speed and endurance—well, for me it was a double espresso mocha.”
Diet remains the biggest challenge for her, psychologically. She apologizes right off if she seems distant or slow: her weight is still eight pounds too high, even accounting for water weight, and she’s been depleting carbohydrates to get it down. “The last three days has been a meal of egg whites and a protein drink in the morning, then four meals of approximately four ounces of chicken, turkey, or fish and green beans, with just another protein shake at night.”
She leans her head slowly to one side. “I’m not getting too much energy. I’m fatigued. It takes me longer to formulate thoughts. It’s hard to speak sometimes. It takes twice as long to do everything.” One thing she gets enough of is water, two gallons a day, until the Thursday before competition, when it drops to a gallon, then halves again each day until she’s just sucking ice cubes the morning of the event. “I’ve witnessed a few grand mal seizures backstage,” she says, offhandedly. “People literally get doubled over with cramps.”
Extreme dieting isn’t the only seemingly unhealthy practice bodybuilders will try in order to appear healthy. Steroids are a matter-of-fact reality. “I don’t worry about the long-term health effects,” Nicander says of her anabolic cycling. “I started late, and I get my blood tested after every competition, and so far my bloods have always been really healthy.”
She goes on to explain her feelings about ’roid rage, in the news lately because of professional wrestler Chris Benoit, who strangled his wife and smothered his son before hanging himself. Investigators discovered anabolics in his house, and since then the phrase “ ’roid rage” has been in every headline related to the tragic story. “I have a lot of childhood anger,” Nicander says, “and I’ve spent a lot of time dealing with that. I feel like there are a lot of adults, bodybuilders or not, who haven’t done that work and have a lot of anger and rage built up inside of them. Steroids will have an amplifying effect on that, but I don’t think they cause the rage. The rage is caused by other things that people haven’t dealt with.”
Still, with the unknown risks of injected testosterone and the hazards of pre-event nutrient and water depletion, there’s a tremendous amount of personal sacrifice that goes into bodybuilding competition. What’s surprising is that Nicander considers the sacrifice to be as much, if not more, on the shoulders of her loved ones. (She also has a 12-year-old daughter, Oceanah.)
“It’s summertime for the kids, and I want to do festive things,” she says, “but I don’t know if you’ve ever paid attention to this, but everything we do socially revolves around food.”
She lists all the activities that are difficult for her to do without breaking her diet: beach picnics, movies, amusement parks . . . even meeting someone at a coffee shop. “My mom and grandfather, they don’t understand the temptations,” she says. “We go to Marie Callender’s for dinner, and it was all I could do to even smile. Each kid has a chocolate sundae on either side of me, and nobody could understand. ‘Why is Gabrielle in such a bad mood?’ ”
Then, after all that, the final decisions come down to judges, whose personal tastes can be idiosyncratic at best, unpredictable at worst. Bodybuilding isn’t about getting muscles to be as big as possible. Contestants are judged on overall appearance and symmetry, with that last word being particularly key. Nicander says her arms get big so fast, she can only work them out every other week.
“I had a trainer say they make my shoulders look narrow, and that I need to decrease their size,” she says. “You just never know what [the judges] are looking for. Sometimes the less sharp person is going to win. Supposedly there’s a mandate for girls to have 20 percent less muscle mass, because they thought we were getting too big and they wanted less muscle. But the bigger girl still always wins. There’s a lot of politics, just like with anything.”
Tevin asks for a Coke. She tells him to go get one, but he doesn’t want to go alone. I can see her blocking out the sights and sounds of the coffee shop we’re in. I suddenly feel like an ass for bringing her here, as she lightly pounds her fists on the table top in an alternating rhythm. Suddenly she looks up. “Every time I do it, I think it’s going to be the last time, and then I get on stage and it’s just so wonderful and fantastic. It’s compared to childbirth, in that there’s so much pain and discomfort, but look at the prize you get.” Her muscles flex.
The World of Gabe
It’s an energized Gabe a few days later, preparing for a workout at Gold’s Gym and chatting in the lobby area with another local bodybuilder competing at the NPC USA’s in Las Vegas, Kirk Chittick. They smile and pose for the camera, then joke about all the fish they’ve been eating. After he leaves, she brags about him for a bit, then can’t resist getting one tease in. “On his answering machine, he calls himself The Kirk.” Her smile is a mile wide and she allows herself one sharp bark of a laugh.
We wander back to a corner of the weight room where Nicander intends to work out her legs for the entirety of the session. A trainer named Steve is there with a client named George, who is 65 and just competed in a local competition at the Rio Theatre. Steve is bragging on behalf of his protégé. “Ever since then the ladies have loved him,” he says as George smiles. “One young woman came up to him just outside the back door here and said, ‘I saw you in the competition. You looked amazing. Can I touch you?’ Well, he’s been a workout fiend ever since then.” Both men laugh, and I think I detect the start of a blush in George’s face, though it could be from the exertion of the hundreds of pounds he’d been lifting before we came by.
“See, that’s the problem we have with the perception of us as bodybuilders,” Nicander begins, but Steve interrupts: “Yes, that we’re stupid, and stuck on ourselves, and angry all the time—”
“No,” she says, “that we are like gods. People want to put us on a pedestal and touch us like our power will rub off. We’re just like everyone else, but with less body fat.”
The men fail to murmur or nod in agreement, and I sense this is a feminine perspective on matters, one born of the mocking Nicander sometimes faces that the men—who receive predominantly positive, fondling attention—do not. They wish her luck on the upcoming contest, obviously and genuinely proud of her, then continue with the free weights. Nicander starts marching up and down the aisle with deep leg lunges, making long strides with the back knee almost touching the ground, the front knee squared, her hands on her hips.
After a few reps of this, she stops and confides that the days of eating only tilapia cause her to hit a wall much sooner than normal. “You know CPR, right?”
Even at Gold’s, where bulk and sinew reign, Gabe stands out as a tower. She bench presses 225 pounds, dead lifts 365 pounds, and can leg press 1,000 pounds. The pedestal comment seems apt: there’s an illusion of marble, tree bark, tough stuff. The very real and tender side is visible only through the eyes, which go glassy or close altogether when she’s in the midst of working out. Still, she comes back to life between sets, clearly feeling chatty.
She talks about the massages she’s doing for the first time, to see if the release of lactic acid will help stave off fatigue. “My masseuse calls them energy-sucking vampires,” she laughs. “Whether it helps physiologically or not, it definitely helps psychologically.”
She sits on a thigh-squeezing machine—“I hate these things”—and does a few sets while having me listen to her choice of music for her evening, free-form competition routine (assuming she will place in the top five and be able to perform it): “Galvanized” by the Chemical Brothers. I joke that the song, most recognizable from its constant “don’t hold back” refrain, is being used in Budweiser commercials. She adds another layer of irony by letting drop that she’s a recovering alcoholic.
“I think that part being in my background has a lot to do with me feeling different,” she says. “Even when I looked ‘normal’—I mean, I’ve always been in shape, just not this big—but even then, I felt different. And that’s what I like about Santa Cruz, why I kept coming back to it after the military and school. It’s like Halloween every day here. It’s where I’ve always been comfortable.” Don’t hold back.
There’s less judgment? “No.” She pauses to think. “I still feel comfortable and a part of Santa Cruz, but there’s the same judgments about me and my masculinity as a bodybuilder that there would be anywhere else, like the Midwest or something. The hardest is at the amusement park, where everyone’s in a bikini. The teenage kids are just ruthless, and right in front of my kids.” Don’t hold back.
Another pause. “If I’m not smiling, people think I’m ready to fight. All the time. Just because I have added muscle, I’m ready to kick someone’s ass.” Lift. Drop. “I’ll be walking down the street and I’ll hear, ‘Hey, are you going to lift a car?’ At least here I feel like I can go, ‘Well look at you, freak.’” Don’t hold back.
We get to talking about the Wharf to Wharf race taking place that weekend. She shares her experience of 10 years ago, when her daughter was just a toddler and she ran with her in a stroller. “I got all these nasty comments about being in the way,” she says, her weight pin now holding up 250 pounds as she squeezes. “People were literally jumping over the stroller as they bitched.” Lift. Drop. “But nobody says anything to the five guys chained in a row and dressed like a penis.” Lift. Drop. Don’t hold back.
Lights, Camera, Action . . .
In addition to part-time personal training, Nicander makes her money by posing in front of a web cam for internet fetish sites, and traveling around the world to wrestle men. The female wrestling contact list on the internet (wb270.com), run by “Diana the Valkyrie,” lists Nicander’s services as “light wrestling, muscle worship, and posing.” Just below are a pair of reviews from satisfied, anonymous customers.
“Opened the door in a purple mini and my goodness this is a big woman! Her limbs, especially her legs, are much larger than they appear in even her current photos. We were both about 200 pounds, me a little taller, but her control during wrestling was total. If she gets her legs around you, forget it. Enormous thighs, gargantuan calves. Intense muscle worship. I’m sorry I hadn’t seen her earlier.”
“Gabe is a very attractive and sexy large bodybuilder who is very shapely and thickly muscled all over. For my tastes, she has fantastic legs and glutes. She is very friendly, has a great sense of humor, and very accommodating. Our session was mostly lifts and carries, muscle worship and some light wrestling. For this session she was 200 pounds of rock-hard muscle, but not contest shape, which was fine for me. She is extremely powerful and probably held back quite a bit with me.”
Another site, for the right price, will let you watch a video of Gabe, in a bikini, wrestling a man named Dave. Per the description, she “was all set to wrestle a guy named Dale . . . but when Dale saw her, he chickened out at the last minute and begged to be replaced by the guy running the video camera, Dave. Dave reluctantly agreed. At six-foot, 150 pounds, Dave thought he’d do better than Dale would, but Gabrielle easily defeated him with her superior upper and lower body strength. She crushed him with her huge thighs, smothered him with her large breasts and sat all over his face.”
The wrestling began about the same time as the bodybuilding, when various acquaintances introduced Nicander to the world of male submissive wrestling fetish (a bigger world than you might imagine). By the time she became affiliated with wb270.com, she was getting phone calls all day long, enough that she could quit her teaching jobs at Cabrillo College and San Jose State University. “It exploded,” she says. “I saw the money I could make, although it hasn’t continued to be like that, I’m not getting rich.” One of the benefits of the gig is it practically demands frequent travel to romantic locations all over the globe, although it’s not exactly vacation. Her recent tour of the Canadian province of Quebec was a good example of the mixture of good and bad in the work. “I was in Montreal during one of the largest jazz and blues festivals in the world, trying to drive around with all the signs in French. The trip to Canada cost me $2,500, and I made about $5,000, and that’s basically my income for the month.”
While she enjoys the work, there’s one thing she would do differently if started over: use a different name. A quick Google search reveals photos of her wearing Army fatigues while holding a medieval sword, posing in a classic arm curl while wearing a pink bikini, arm wrestling another famous female bodybuilder named Lauren Powers, and arms crossed over her bare breasts, muscles bulging. “About 14 sites come up,” she says, “and half of them are porn. I don’t do any porn, but for some reason my name gets affiliated with them.”
Even with her teaching experience and educational degree, she thinks it will be difficult to get a teaching certification to instruct K-12 physical education. “All it takes is one parent Googling my name. Just recently I’ve had to accept jumping in with both feet, but how far do I want to go? I’ve got friends who go into porn and make a lot of money, but I’m not willing to do it. I’ve got kids. I’m willing to do artistic nudity, but, you know, more the Playboy, not the Hustler stuff.”
An opportunity also came up for Nicander to relocate to Los Angeles, where she could get modeling and film work. She seriously pondered it, but made up her mind when a friend asked her what her definition of success is. “Why would I move down there? To be more successful? I don’t look at success as being Miss Olympia or becoming a millionaire. I look at success as being a good mother and having the time to build relationships with my children as they grow up. It’s more of a balance. I try to keep as much balance as I can in my life.”
She gets a faraway look in her eyes. I can sense the fatigue setting in, and her mind reeling back into focusing on the competition. “I don’t believe in coincidences, I believe in fate,” she says slowly, absently. “One door closes, and another one opens.”
There’s a silence, and then her blue eyes brighten. “Actually, I’d like to marry a rich man.”
Under Pressure
Temperatures in Las Vegas hovered between 100 and 110 the weekend of the competition, July 26 and 27. The NPC circuit is the official amateur feeder league to the big-time, International Federation of Bodybuilding & Fitness (IFBB) circuit, where pros rake in endorsement money and substantial cash prizes. Only one of the 54 female competitors gets the coveted pro card at the national championship.
Depleted, hot, and mustering every ounce of her willpower just to make it through the weekend, Nicander took the stage smiling and made it through to the second call-out, eventually placing tenth out of the 19 women in the heavyweight division.
While it wasn’t quite her goal of a top five finish, she celebrated the improvement with an omelet stuffed with cheese and sausage, and a stack of pancakes dripping with butter and syrup. “I’ve also had three milkshakes since then,” Nicander says. “That was just a craving that came up in the final moments.”
She’s already spoken to her trainer Gary Udit about strategy for next year’s competition. (Plans in the meantime include becoming her 89-year-old grandfather’s personal trainer: “He needs more strength and balance.”) She weighed in at 168—a new personal low for this amount of muscle mass—but wants to get to 162 next year. “He says I also need to broaden my shoulders with more muscle to make my waist look smaller, get more of that tapered look.”
The question of whether it’s worth it doesn’t even arise. Instead, she offers, “It’s important to be clear about goals and why you do it. Anything outside societal norms is going to be the hardest path to take. Judgments come from all arenas, all corners. You just have to do it for you.”
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