Bodybuilder’s comeback boosted by ‘Mr. Colorado’ win

Date: 05-02-2007 Posted by: Anabolic Info TeamUnited States

LONGMONT — When Chris Berger’s mom first watched him compete in a bodybuilding competition 17 years ago, she said it reminded her of the Miss America pageant.

Both muscle men and beauty queens strut in fig leaf-sized swimwear to take the stage that belongs to the young — to those without wrinkle or sag.

At 38, Berger is no longer a young man. Silver flecks his short, dark brown hair.

Still, he showed up last summer in the tradition of Rocky, his Hollywood hero, for the 2006 Colorado State Bodybuilding Championship in Englewood.
 The judges awarded first place to the 5-foot-8, 190-pound light heavyweight, though he stood in a row of more than a dozen men younger by years.

Earning the “Mr. Colorado” title pumped up Berger to compete at the USA Bodybuilding Championship in Las Vegas and the North American Bodybuilding Championship in Cleveland this summer.

He’ll hop on a plane with his wife and two young children and, for a few days, leave his predictable life as a personal fitness trainer and owner of the Longmont workout studio Anytime Fitness.

Berger first gravitated to bodybuilding while growing up in Mahopac, N.Y.

In fourth grade, he cut his face out of a family photograph and glued it onto the body of a bodybuilder.

“I brought it to school and showed everybody, ‘This is me,’” Berger said, recalling the way it shocked the “110-year-old sister” running his Catholic homeroom.

By sixth grade, while his classmates licked their lips on hot dog day in the cafeteria, he preferred brown-bag lunches of tuna on whole wheat and an apple.

Berger remembers rifling through his mother’s Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, and Woman’s Day magazines to learn as much as he could about nutrition.

Around age 13, he picked up a barbell for the first time at a friend’s house and got bit by the iron bug. Berger begged his parents that Christmas for a weight set endorsed by Dallas Cowboys star Randy White.

By 1983, the set dominated the family’s unheated two-car garage. Working out with classic rock tunes as background music, Berger gradually put 60 pounds of muscle on his 140-pound frame.

At age 17, Berger started competing. But he faced the same problem he faces now: being out of sync with the sport’s prime age.

“There was no teenage division,” he said. “So I had to compete with guys in their 20s and 30s. That was rough for getting my feet wet.”

After placing in the middle of the pack in his first two shows, Berger took two years off to build muscle and focus without the stress of competition.

By the time he graduated cum laude from State University of New York at Cortland in 1991 with a bachelor’s degree in health science, he had re-entered the sport with distinction.

He retired from bodybuilding in 1999.

“But I never felt like I finished what I started,” Berger said.

Finished, in this case, meant winning bodybuilding competitions at the national level and becoming an icon in the niche sport.

He hopes for a second comeback now.

As he flies through his cardio routine on the elliptical machine, he forgets about beating competitors and concentrates on being called out by the judges for first place.

“I’m not thinking about it being over,” he said. “I’m really powered by every minute of every workout. I like getting under the weights.”