Bodybuilding has become the backbone of her existence

Bonnie Malumed lives in a splendid house in Villanova. She is married to a busy orthopedic surgeon. She is the mother of two boys and a devoted school volunteer. She is a registered nurse who has tended patients in intensive care. And she has worked as a fitness instructor and trainer at several gyms and health clubs.
In a corner of her living room is a collection of trophies she has won in amateur bodybuilding contests. She has been featured in muscle magazines and has an album of photos showing her in various competition poses.

Her body is gorgeous: shapely, muscular, strong, sexy. Her abdomen is beyond flat; it's concave. At 47, she has a figure that would shame most twentysomethings. A fervent believer in natural bodybuilding, she shuns drugs. At just under 5-6, she weighs 135 pounds. She's a poster girl for the cardinal principle of body evaluation: Let the mirror, not the scale, be the judge.

From all appearances, she is richly blessed. Her life seems lucky and easy. But, oh, how appearances can deceive...

Growing up on the South Shore of Long Island, Bonnie Malumed was a misfit. The other girls were princesses. They lived to primp and gossip. Bonnie was a jock. She lived to do gymnastics and to surf. Imagine that: a Jewish surfer girl.

She was surfing one day when a boy riding the same wave lost control. His board slammed into Bonnie's back, breaking it. Bonnie was carried out of the water. She was 16, sentenced to bed rest, warned that her spine was unstable. No athletics.

"It totally killed me," Malumed recalls.

She rebelled, of course. After a token amount of time, she showed up at the Jack LaLanne gym in town and began rehabbing by lifting weights. Her dad, Jack Nager, was partly to blame. Diagnosed with cancer, he refused to abandon the active life. He kept running, training for marathons. He is still alive today.

Another inspiration: pioneering bodybuilder Rachel McLish, who was proving that women, too, could pump iron and a muscular female body is beautiful.

"I liked having an athletic body, and I wanted to keep it," Malumed explains.

She continued training with weights at the University of Miami, where she earned her nursing degree. And she lifted while working as an intensive care unit nurse at Manhattan's Lenox Hill Hospital, where she met her husband, Jeffrey. Their first date: They went running in Central Park.

The couple moved to Cincinnati so Jeffrey could take a sports-medicine fellowship. By then, Bonnie had given birth to their first son. During the pregnancy, she had gained 100 pounds. Dismayed by what had happened to her once-sleek physique, she hit the weights with a vengeance. "I was determined to get my body back."

For motivation, she hatched a goal: to compete in her first bodybuilding contest. She got her body back, all right: The judges crowned her Ms. Cincinnati.

After moving to the Philadelphia area, Malumed worked as a trainer at Weston Fitness in Bala Cynwyd. Bending over clients, spotting while they lifted weights, took its toll on her back. The pain she'd learned to live with since her accident became acute.

In fall 1996, her doctor delivered the news: Two vertebrae in her back were shifting perilously. If she didn't get them fixed, she might sever her spinal cord.

She underwent spinal-fusion surgery that January. "The pain was indescribable," she says, "worse than childbirth." Bone was drilled out of her hip for a graft. Four pins were inserted to stabilize her spine. For six months, she had to wear a corsetlike plastic brace. She was in agony, unable to drive and exercise.

After 18 months, the operation was deemed a success. Bonnie resumed working out in a fully equipped home gym, a gift from Jeffrey.

Again, she was determined to get her body back. Again, she succeeded, winning first place in her weight class and first overall in the 1999 USA Natural Bodybuilding Championships.

Encouraged, she entered the 2000 Hercules Championships in New York. Again, she brought home hardware, including a sword for first place in the master's division.

A few months later, as she was running, something was amiss. Her shoes maybe? Suddenly, stabbing, debilitating pain in her back. Then, numbness and paralysis in her left leg. Diagnosis: a ruptured disk. Another operation to clean out the debris.

It was not over. The disk had ruptured for a reason: Her spine had not fused after all; her back was still broken. A few months later, she went under the knife yet again. This time, she was cut both front and back. Her abdominal organs were pushed aside so her spine could be aligned and fortified from both sides.

The days after surgery were "pure hell." Malumed was on a morphine drip and powerful painkillers. After a month, she quit. "I don't want to become addicted," she remembers thinking, "and I don't want my kids to see me taking painkillers. I'm not that kind of mom."

Her medication today: strength training.

"I get high on weights. I live to train, and I train to live. If I didn't train, I wouldn't be able to function.

"I live with chronic pain. Some days are better than others, but I can deal with it. I'm a warrior, and weights are my best weapon."