Women muscling in on Hercules

At 30, Lee Myung-hee couldn't fire retinal laser beams and she wouldn't be caught dead in tight blue and red pants, but she could outrun trains and squat 155 lbs, bench press 95 lbs and bicep curl 60 lbs - 10 times. Fully dressed, she could be a Korean movie starlet. In a bikini and smeared in grease, even G.I. Jane would run screaming.

"Even when I was young I had a muscular body. Other people said it was yuck but to me it was kind of attractive," said Lee, whose PR girl pep belies a physique of hardened steel.

In the gender-reversed, social Darwinist world of professional bodybuilding things can frequently assume the air of a circus freak show: men with breasts posing before a panel of judges, V-shaped women with veins inscribing their body like subway maps.

In Asia, Singapore has dominated the sport since being the first country to recognize the International Federation of BodyBuilders Mr. Universe competition in 1983, after British military personnel allegedly introduced it as a recreation in the 1940s. It was finally acknowledged last year in the 14th Asian Games in Busan, where Cho Wang-bung flexed his way through the seven mandatory poses to seize gold in the 60 kg weight group. Although not as shady as the boxing world, politics reared its ugly face when Singaporeans Heron Abdul Halim Bin and Zaniel Amire Bin were awarded gold and bronze medals at 65 kg and the police had to be called to quell an officials' uprising.

In strait-laced Korean culture, where men wear poker faces and women wear ankle-length skirts - Ha Ri-soo being the trans-gender exception who proves the rule - professional female bodybuilding is struggling to gain a foothold. With no state funding, a rotating group of at best 30 women (one-tenth the number of men) usually only last a couple of years before hanging up their dumbbells.

"In Korea there are no financial rewards for us, no fame, the Korean Body Building Federation don't even pay for oil or supplements. Men can get monthly subsidies from local councils if they hit the top three (in contests), but for women there are no incentives, so most of them quit," said Lee, Korea's fastest-rising star who is currently on sabbatical.

Last year, Korea was scheduled to send seven women to Guiyang, China to compete in the annual Asian Bodybuilding Olympiad before four failed their dope tests.

Considering that the same contestants could boast of medals from Korea's three big competitions - Mr Seoul (May 24, Olympic Park), Spring Contest (April 25) and Mr Korea (July 18-19, Olympic Park) - judges throughout Asia seem less scrupulous when it comes to the domestic use of steroids.

"In China, all the local girls were so massive. With a natural diet and working out, it's impossible to get that kind of mass and volume," said Lee, who took first, second and third place respectively in the above contests last year and was one of the three who competed internationally.

Of all the sacrifices women bodybuilders make, performing their own double-mastectomies with the aid of flesh-burning bench presses and risking kidney damage with a protein-saturated diet hardly compares to the psychological trauma they encounter on their lonely pilgrimage to the pantheon of the gods, suggests Lee.

"Just before Guiyang, I had a kind of mental problem, I got really depressed, I had no social life, had to control myself, not eat, and spend the whole day alone training. I was like a machine, always checking my watch. Could you do that? I can't believe I did that for a year," she said.

Before clinching a silver medal with male partner Lee Eun-suck and garnering fifth place in the woman's under-49 kg in China, Lee had to smile and flex under football stadium-strength lights while her body pulsed with involuntary spasms to a techno-remix of the Superman soundtrack.

Dehydrating herself by a final 4 kg in the seven days leading up to the contest to shave her body fat level from a healthy 25 percent to minus 10 made muscle cramp, nausea and vertiginous dizziness the final chronicle in Lee's yearlong odyssey to flex her pecs with the gods.

For 160 cm tall Lee, who body checks male team-mates on ice-hockey team "The Padres" when she's not playing volleyball with U.S. soldiers at Yongsan base, that punishing year took the form of a high-concept movie: Rocky meets Groundhog Day.

Days consisted of torturous repetition, blurring together into twice-daily 3-hour gym sessions, the main muscle groups rotated with each visit, an 8 km, 700-calorie burning run up Mt. Nam every morning, an hour-long power nap at lunch, chicken breasts, bananas and vegetables consumed at two and a half hour intervals, Creatine drinks, vitamin supplements, glutamine, stretching, and finally posing to J-Lo's "Let's get Loud" to refine and sculpt those curves.

"It was a full time job," she admitted. "There's no way you could hold down a job and do that. And it was my first time. I didn't have any experience, I didn't know anything about diet." Whereas Rocky had old-timer coach Mickey and Arnie had Joe Weider, Lee operated in a financial, instruction-less vacuum, clawing her way up the bodybuilding podium like a cat on a hot tin roof.

In Korea's world of professional pump and grind, which as of yet fails to retail a single domestic "musclemag," sponsorship with sports brands like Adidas are her only ticket to ripping out those airplane lats in preparation for a comeback. For women, the embryonic industry demands political indoctrination in the art of self-promotion, which is why April 12 Lee was stripped down and sweating for a photo shoot to grace the cover of next month's "Health Magazine," a free monthly distributed to health clubs throughout the country.

Ironically, the idiosyncrasies of Korean culture might have proven a springboard that helped her leapfrog the usual two or three years it takes to hit the international circuit.

"The judges were looking for feminine women with balance and symmetry - small muscles but sharp definition. In Asia, facial beauty is more important. Some people say that's why they sent me (to China)," she laughed.