A powerful mind: world records in powerlifting and a PhD. What's next for high achiever Laryssa McCloud Fulton? - Real Women - Interview

Laryssa McCloud Fulton, PhD, has always been athletically inclined. She started running track while in middle school, and she played center on her high school basketball squad. During college, she did aerobics. But Reesie, as she has been known since she was a little girl, made it through college without ever lifting even the lightest of weights. It wasn't until the fall of 1994, while working on her doctorate in physiology, that Reesie decided pumping iron might be a good way to relieve some of the stress that came with days of nonstop studying and lab work. At least that was the idea. Problem was, she could barely lift a thing.

"The first time in the gym, I tried to bench just the 45-pound bar and it almost flipped me over," Reesie recalls with a laugh. "That first rep surprised me--I had no idea my upper body was that weak. People were teasing me about it and I was like, 'Okay, if you're going to tease, then I'm going to show you what I can do.'"

The 5'11" and then-148-pound Reesie dug in and did what came naturally: She worked hard. She quickly progressed from no reps to six and, ultimately, into hardcore training territory. By the spring of 1995, she was entering powerlifting competitions. By 1996 she was the World Natural Powerlifting Federation's world champion in the 148-pound class. By 1997, she was the champ again, this time in the 165-pound class. While competing at 163 pounds, she maxed out at a 355-pound squat, a 450-pound deadlift and a 145-pound bench press. Few people could believe that a gym novice had come so far in just a couple of years, particularly while continuing the demanding work on her doctorate. But Reesie? She wasn't surprised. It was a challenge, and she lives for meeting challenges in every part of her life.

"Challenges have always appealed to me," notes Reesie, who currently works at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta as a postdoctoral fellow in the Vascular Biology Center. "I love to try something different, something totally unexpected. And I love to do what people say I can't."

COMPETITIVE seasoning

Reesie has been doing just hat since her childhood in Columbia, South Carolina. She grew up with one sister and three brothers, two of them older. All of them liked to jump, throw and run. "We were constantly on the go, at the schoolyard or running, and I remember challenging the boys to races," Reesie remarks. "I've always been into that, even when girls weren't supposed to go out there and run with the guys. That's just something I loved to do."

That early competitive seasoning, coupled with her innate love for sports, helped Reesie become a high school track-and-field star. She rah the 100- and 200-meter sprints, the 4x100 relay and did the long jump. Trophies, conference championships and trips to the lower state meet piled up. Her basketball career, however, was short-lived. She was hobbled by shin-splints and, after a year on the team, she gave up hoops to focus her extracurricular energies completely on track.

Yet to pigeonhole Reesie as one-dimensional would be selling her short. Very short. She thrived academically in high school, particularly in the sciences, and graduated as valedictorian. Her record of excellence earned her a scholarship to Benedict College in Columbia, where she planned to become an orthodontist. To reach that goal, Reesie decided she needed to maintain the standard of academic excellence she'd set in high school, and that meant giving up competitive sports. "Back then, girls' sports weren't pushed as much as they are today," she points out. "If things had been like they are now, I might have done it all differently, but hindsight is 20/20. I'm happy that things have changed for women who want to play sports."

All proceeded according to plan until her sophomore year, when Reesie was recruited into Benedict's Minority Biomedical Research Support program. She had no experience with research science and didn't quite know what it entailed, but she soon realized it was what she wanted to do professionally. Not only did it offer a new challenge and the thrill of discovery--research science, by nature, involves working on projects nobody else has worked on before--but it enabled her to do things she'd never done before, like take her first-ever plane trip to California for a scientific symposium. "It opened up so many doors," she explains. "It was so exciting."

After graduation, Reesie began studying for her doctorate. She loved the program, sure, but it was also the most stressful thing she'd ever done. For a very social person such as herself, the program was individualized and isolating, not to mention difficult. Plus, no one in her family had reached such an elite academic level, and she didn't want to let anybody down. That's when Reesie started weightlifting in an effort to cope with the various demands. "I hadn't been doing anything other than walking and some aerobics, and I got interested in going to a gym and trying to lift weights, just to try something new," she remembers. "I loved it. It was the best way for me to relieve all the stress I was carrying around every day"