From behind the heavy, red velvet curtains, you can’t really see the audience, but you might peek and squint to see if you recognize anyone in the sea of faces. At the same time, you are going over your routine in your head, flexing and trying to keep a pump, after “pumping up” for far too long. Your skin is tanned, a golden brown that bronze statues aspire to, and an even coat of oil makes you glisten under the stage lights. 

The smell is a mix of old auditorium, perspiration and vasodilator. The air is still. So is your heart because it is now in your throat, as the expeditor calls your division to the stage, in numerical order. You drew No. 3. The number of performers. A good omen.  

As you take the stage, you try to remain poised and elegant to impress the judges, to keep their attention, to somehow persuade them with your presence that you are clearly the best of the group. 

You try to remember all of our coach’s corrections and instructions. Without a mirror you don’t know what we look like. Each pose must be perfected in the mirror for years until its filed away in your memory banks for occasions such as these. The hardest part, believe it or not, is flexing every muscle at the same time while smiling and looking graceful. You are human art, living statues brought to life. Like dance or theater, it’s a performance. 

You stand before the solemn judges who don’t seem to care that you are smiling at them. You just keep wishing they would smile back, or give any indication of how you rank. 

You have no idea how we look. It’s not that you haven’t studied yourself from every flattering – and unflattering – angle in great detail bordering obsession, but you never know what you look like until you stand next to someone else. 

You flex and turn and flex again. They move you around as an indicator of your placement so as to compare the best from the dead center. If you are called to center, that is the bodybuilding equivalent of bingo. Odds are you won, top three for sure, but not always. Most ripped person wins, but not always. Biggest muscles wins, but not always. 

This is a subjective sport. It has no code of points. It is performance art, and like all art, it is full of critics in addition to the judges. It is a sport on being judged strictly on your appearance. From your hair, makeup and suit cut choice, to the number and quality of Swarovski crystals on your posing suit. From the moment you step on the stage, you are asking a panel of strangers to decide your fate. This is not for the faint of heart, you have to really know who you are in this sport to persevere. I mean everyone has a shot at it, you just hope you have more of what the judges want. You have to remember it was only the opinion of those judges on that day, and you must truly believe that you can improve in order to one day become a true champion. 

It’s a daunting task, especially in the world of natural bodybuilding, where you have nothing but what God gave you and an inner belief in yourself. You’ve overcome a lot of resistance and consumed many, many chickens. It’s a fool’s quest to some, but there is something incredibly rewarding about discipline itself, when you realize through the process, that if you dig deep and stay the course, that if indeed you don’t give up on yourself, that you are capable of truly great things. 

As you are paraded off the stage you are just as uncertain as to when you went on, but there is a sense of completion. If you messed up, if you felt unsure, well, at least the hard part was over and the only thing left to do is wait and eat. 

After 12 weeks of counting everything that goes into your body, drinking the equivalent of a small swimming pool in water, after hours of sweating, of burning calories hoping they are only fat, and burning out your muscles until you temporarily can’t walk correctly, after practicing pose after pose, perfecting your transitions, it’s over, in just over five minutes.

 Now, we wait and we eat, not a Big Mac quite yet, but something within the realm of normal humans who eat without care. A candy bar, a donut, a small slice of pizza can do wonders for a depleted body and spirit. And the results start rolling in, each division getting its due recognition and photographers create documentation, so you have tangible evidence of your experience, a timestamp on your achievements thus far. At last, your division is called. 

You have so many emotions going through your mind and you are not even sure what your full name is if someone asked you right then. You are only listening for your number to be called. You either hope they call it last, or you are just happy if they call it at all. For the lucky handful whose number is called it will be a night filled with celebration and for others bittersweet, but all are left better for the experience and immediately dream of ways to do it better. If all the world’s a stage, then bodybuilders are the masters of presentation. 

Dina Burley is a native of Biddeford, a fitness trainer and competitor who has coached national champions and worked with Olympic gymnasts, professional stunt actors and tour dancers to look and live at peak performance.