JEFF BINNS
As Jake VanWoerkom flexed his muscles in his first-ever body-building contest, Tom Petty's "Runnin' Down a Dream" was blaring and his spray tan was dripping.
Runnin' down a dream that never would come to me. Working on a mystery, goin' wherever it leads.
"I'm a sweaty mess at this point," he laughed during a recent interview at Grounded Coffee Shop off of Telegraph Road. "You're under these bright lights and the tanning stuff is sweating off of me. My wife was taking a video. You could hear my son ask, 'Is Daddy bleeding?'"
Working out wasn’t new to VanWoerkom — he had routinely worked out at home starting in his late teens (he’s now 36), but life got in the way about three years ago and he stopped. After that, the Alexandria family man had trouble re-starting a fitness routine while handling the daily stresses of family life with a toddler and a new job.
In January 2017, while strolling through Old Town Alexandria, he and his wife happened upon Orangetheory Fitness. They decided to join. At the same time, he stepped up his at-home workouts and began the Keto diet.
Trainers at the fitness center helped him map out his goals. In the fall of 2018, he read that eating carbs was good for strength-training. "It was like a switch, I could lift a lot more."
He tracked the amount of fat, protein and carbs he consumed and limited himself to 2,000 calories a day. (He preferred more filling "real food" to protein shakes.)
He kept track of what he was eating on a spreadsheet on his phone. In the mornings, a typical breakfast was Kodiak pancakes, two eggs and toast. For lunch, he might go to Cava Grill. For dinner, it was protein and vegetables. He drank lots of water and gave up alcohol for two months. He had initially weighed 180 pounds and trimmed down to about 151 before the competition.
In January 2019, he went back on the Keto diet. "That's when the inklings of bodybuilding got started," he said. By March, his wife was urging him to think about entering a competition.
By the summer, he decided to go for it and signed up for the Natural Bodybuilding Competition in Woodbridge in late July. The day he signed up was the Monday before the weekend of the contest. That meant there wasn’t much time to prepare.
In the gym that week, he continued to work out as efficiently as possible since he was always on a tight schedule. He worked out every day, sometimes both mornings and nights, working out different parts of the body on alternate days at the gym and at home, a routine he had gotten into over the past year.
He was "super shredded and good to go," he said.
His biggest hurdle? He had never been to a bodybuilding competition, even as a spectator. "I should have hired a coach."
In the days before the competition, he "was a wreck," he said. "I was super stressed out and had my job to do too. There's all this conflicting information about what you should eat that week: 'You should cut all the sodium out of your diet.' Others are like 'Don't do that.' Others are 'Drink a lot of water all week until the final day.' It made it that much more miserable eating no sodium and drinking lots of water."
A day before the competition, "I hadn't yet practiced my posing. I was like 'Oh, man, I really need to do this.'"
VanWoerkom said he Googled "how to pose in a body-building competition" and watched videos. "I got my posing trunks and asked my wife to tell me which poses are better," he said. "It takes a lot out of you to pose for like a minute. I couldn't even do it for five minutes."
The competition was broken down by weight and age; the day itself was broken down into pre-judging and a show in the evening "where you have to do a routine for 70 seconds," he said.
The night before the competition, "they 'pre-tan' you — it's a whole thing," he said. "The program spray tans contestants the night before in a conference room."
"That's when I started practicing my posing routine," he said, "at 7 o'clock that night."
The next morning, a second layer of "tan" was sprayed on, along with a bronzer. "By this time, I'm Caribbean vacation-level dark," he said.
The next thing he knew, he was striding toward the judges, his wife and son cheering him on, Petty blaring on the speakers.
It felt so good, like anything was possible. Hit cruise control and rubbed my eyes.
VanWoerkom came in second in the "True Novice" category he competed in and he won the "Open A" division. He found out later from bodybuilding aficionados who were there that he just needed to work on his posing.
His advice for anyone trying to get back into fitness? "Go for a walk. Jog on a treadmill. Take it one day at a time. If you'll keep at it," he said, "you'll see results over time. It takes consistency and motivation. Once you start seeing results, that is a motivator in and of itself."
