Clare has a body to suffer for
Last updated 11:23, Friday, 30 May 2008
She looks amazing. Like a marble statue magicked into life, a comic-book hero that has stepped off a page. Muscles mound and hollow, curve and sweep across a taut and tanned frame.
There’s not an ounce, not a gramme of fat.
Clare Burrell is buffed and honed: a lean, mean, posing machine.
But she’s not a poser.
Quite the opposite actually, as she squirms in her chair, fidgets and giggles nervously as she softly answers questions about her new-found success in something she has only taken seriously over the past few months.
Over the past few weeks she has been named Miss Cumbria Toned Body 2008 which provides a passport to represent the UK in the toned body section of Miss Universe on June 7.
Then she went to Southport and won the National Amateur Bodybuilding Association’s Miss Toned Body North West show to win a place in the British Finals, which take place tomorrow..
I always thought that women involved in this sort of thing had arms the size of my waist, voices like miners, were luminous orange and broke razors on their top lip as well as their legs.
Clare has muscles, but they don’t look as though they belong to someone else.
She doesn’t look like a solid block of flesh, stitched together with bulging veins.
She’s 5ft 6ins with a 25-inch waist and weighs in at about eight and a half stone.
What she takes part in is not, she is quick to stress, body building.
We’re lounging in the sun outside the Crown Hotel Wetheral where she is leisure centre manager, but she sits upright to make the point: “I don’t regard myself as a bodybuilder, you think of bodybuilders being butch and bulging – in all the wrong places.
“The competitions I enter are about having a toned figure... being feminine... low body fat... muscularity goes against you.
“I have been told to stay the way I am and not go more muscley and I’m happy not to!”
The competitions are not just about muscle-flexing either, she has to choreograph a routine that also includes dance and gymnastics.
She does though, admit to one dark, guilty secret that she shares with those orange-coloured muscle-popping women – using that dodgy fake tan.
“It’s a special tan called ‘Dream Tan’ and it shows up your definition better under the stage lights. It’s gold brown not orange!” she insists.
She laughs when asked if there’s anything she’d like to change about her body. “I’d like smaller feet, these are six-and-a-half,” she says waggling her flip flops.
“I don’t see a massive difference between how I look now to how I was a year ago.
“In my clothes (size 8-10) I look quite skinny and people can’t believe I’m the weight I am, but I’m leaner than most girls and muscle is denser and heavier than fat.
“I love feeling strong, toned and having a nice figure, but in my head, I would not say that my figure is any better than the average girl.
“I would like to have a bigger sweep in my hamstring, not a bulge, but a sweep to my bum.
“My best feature is my back and the shape of it, but I’m lucky because my body is in proportion and if I put on any weight it spreads all over, rather than going on one place.”
Clare has been involved in sport and fitness since she was a child when she used to go running with mum and dad in Gretna.
Since then she has competed in the New York Marathon and a host of half marathons and duathlons.
She is also a keen tennis player and was City of Carlisle ladies’ tennis champion.
She has been at the Crown Hotel for the past eight years and has taught fitness classes for more than a decade.
The years of running, swimming and cycling, hour upon hour in the gym and day after day of teaching aerobics, aqua, yoga, pilates, step, circuits and bums and tums meant she only needed to “tweak” what she already had.
There was no great shock to the system, no step-shift to her routine, just a slight change to her gym regime and eating habits (lots of porridge, which she loves, lean meat, pasta and no thick, rich sauces or creamy food).
Her fridge is full of cottage cheese with pineapple, yoghurts, protein drinks, chicken, turkey and fresh vegetables.
She smiles: “I don’t enjoy creamy or fancy foods and I have not had fish and chips since I was 15.
“I have always had to keep in shape for the job I do and you need to be an example.
“The best holiday I ever had was a fitness camp in Malibu when I was up at 6am then had non-stop activities until 9pm when I just slept!”.
She shares a house in Carlisle with her trainer Natasha Beattie of the Bodytek Gym in Carlisle, and also gets advice and support from Mike Smith at the gym and Rob Carey, the current Mr Scotland who devises her pre-competition food and gym programmes.
It’s a very strict regime that involves eating the correct amounts of protein, carbohydrates and fat every two to three hours.
She has to limit her alcohol intake and drink lots of water, until she nears competition date, when she cuts right back to lose three or four kilos of fluid in her skin and enhance her muscle definition.
This also involves eating dark chocolate and drinking red wine, which seems no real hardship...
“The night before the competition I get to drink three or four glasses of red wine and I usually get a bit drunk.
“I love red wine and it helps dehydrate me. I also have a glass of red wine before I go on stage to give me confidence!” she giggles.
But her new-found success has doubled her weekly food bill and cost her socially and emotionally.
The pressures of training six days a week, and preparing for competition ended her relationship with her boyfriend and she admits she has little time for a new romance – or much chance to even socialise.
“I have stopped going out so often with the girls for a drink,” she frowns.
“I would buy a new outfit and some jewellery and used to go out every week. Now it is once a month.
“If I was to meet someone, I would find it hard to find the time to see him – unless he was willing to come and train with me. I don’t find big muscley guys attractive... guys that are fit and athletic are attractive, some take it too far.”
So why take up a sport or hobby, that involves daily painful workouts down the gym, strict diet control, extra expense and an end to your social life?
“I just wanted a challenge more than anything,”she beams back. I wanted to get something out of all my training and fitness. I wanted a trophy.
“When I trained down at the Bodytek gym, people said I should enter competitions.
“When I went in for the Miss Cumbria title I was doing it for myself. I got my body in the best shape it has ever been in.
“Am I obsessed? Yeah, I admit it,” she grins, but I know when to stop and when to rest.
“For a woman to build muscle it is very, very hard to do because we don’t have enough testosterone. I have to push myself in the gym and my build is naturally thin.”
The 28-year-old is still a relatively young competitor, but added: “I can’t see myself doing it for a long time.
“I would like to do well at it, but I’m just enjoying it for the moment. I’m always looking for a new challenge and will always have that in me.”
