POWERFUL CURE
Weightlifter tackling her addition one squat at a time
Ana Perez strolled through the open air warehouse doors at The Shop Gym, black gym bag in one hand, her red leather lifting belt in the other. On a humid Saturday afternoon in late July, heavy metal music blared through the speakers as Perez headed to the deadlifting corner of the Manassas, Virginia, gym.
Perez changed into blue lifting shorts and a black tank top, then started to put weights on the bar. To Perez, each weight added symbolized something bigger.
The first 45 pounds - her mother sold her when she was just two weeks old. Another 45 pounds - she didn't find out she was adopted until she was 12. Put on 45 more - she struggled with a drug addiction for nearly decade. Add another 45 - she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in her late 20s.
"Back then I had nothing to lose," said Perez, 34. "Today I have everything to lose. Without powerlifting, I don't know where I would be. Probably dead by now."
Perez has been a powerlifter for only two and a half years and is already a Virginia titleholder. Living in Ashburn, Virginia, for the past 11 years, Perez holds state records in squat (402 pounds), dead lift (468 pounds) and bench (209 pounds) in the 198-pound open raw class.
Back at The Shop, Perez continued preparations for her next competition, a meet later this month in Anaheim, California, where she's hoping to challenge national records. It will only be her fifth powerlifting meet of her career.
As Perez completed lift after lift with ease, she reached her final dead lift of the afternoon: 425 pounds - more than twice her body weight. With sweat dripping from her brow, Perez looked around as a horde of gym-goers approached the deadlifting corner. She took a sniff of ammonia, a common tactic used by powerlifters that triggers an inhalation reflex and acts as a hit of adrenaline.
Perez heaved the bar up, muscles flexing, eyes locked straight ahead and teeth clenched as she held the weight for a few seconds while her fellow gym-goers yelled words of encouragement, then calmly placed it back on the ground. Letting out a big sigh of relief, Perez broke out into a wide smile.
"I didn't just get strong," Perez said. "I had to dig the fire and the passion out. This weight I carried on my shoulders for years is the weight I bear during powerlifting."
Perez sees powerlifting as an outlet for her pain, a place where she can have full control. But sometimes she wonders if she's simply replaced one addiction with another.
"There is evidence that exercise in the treatment of depression, substance-use disorders, kind of overall health and sense of well-being, that exercise really does improve that," said Dr. Yngvild Olsen, the medical director of the Institutes for Behavior Resources in Baltimore. "It's a way for people to manage their disease in a manner that doesn't involve substances, in a manner that doesn't involve kind of that loss of control. Now, it is possible for people to overdo it."
Huddled on the floor of a drug den in Southwest Washington, Perez wanted to die. With her phone and car gone, wearing an oversized hoodie and jeans that weren't hers, Perez had been sitting in this drug den for days after her latest drug relapse in February 2008, back into her crack addiction.
Looking back, she says, this was the low point. She recalls taking hit after hit of crack and losing all of her personal possessions for the sake of getting more drugs. Perez knew she had struggled with an addiction since her teenage years and after her latest tumultuous relationship went south, so did she.
"I was on a mission to just die," Perez said. "I wanted to die. I don't know how I didn't die. I prayed the next hit, let that take me."
Perez would have been left in the drug den, if it weren't for her brother, Sam, who managed to track her down. When Sam arrived, he knocked furiously and got into a heated argument with the drug dealer at the front door.
Describing Perez as a "ghost," Sam placed her in the back seat of his car and drove to a 7Eleven gas station where Perez, who not eaten for two weeks, shoved down four hot dogs and five taquitos.
"Ana, she is a nuclear bomb," Sam says today. "She has the potential to be destructive and the potential to be phenomenal."
Perez's addiction struggles can be traced back to her biological mother, who, according to paperwork provided by a social worker, sold her in Connecticut in August 1983 when she was only two weeks old. "Mother sold Joanna to a neighbor previously not known to her and left the state," the report said, using Ana's birth name that was changed when she was adopted. Perez knows the name of her biological mother and siblings, but has not tried to reach out.
After being handed over to a social worker, Perez was sent to Genoveva Hernandez, a foster parent who lived with her husband in Killingly, Connecticut. They had two children of their own, Maribel and Sam, and two adopted children, Nelson and Maria. Perez was officially adopted in August 1984, when she was just more than a year old, and calls them her "true" family.
But Perez says didn't know she was adopted until she was 12, when she and her father got into an argument about her smoking marijuana. He let it slip that she would, "turn out just like your mother," she recalled. Initially confused, Perez figured out what he meant.
"In the end, me and my biological mom, we went down the same path," Perez said.
Other than knowing her biological mother and siblings' names, Perez's adoption paperwork was filled with unknowns, from the health history of her family, the specifics of her birth, to the name of her father. But one thing Hernandez knows for certain is Perez cried a lot as a baby. Not knowing what was wrong, she went to the pediatrician.
"You are going to have a lot of problems with this baby," Hernandez recalls the doctor telling her.
"'What do you mean?" she replied.
"She is in withdrawal from cocaine her mother put in her body," he said.
Despite Hernandez's efforts to keep Perez away from drugs - not even giving her Aspirin as a child - Perez found drugs on her own when she was a teen. First she tried marijuana, then moved into heavier drugs such as cocaine and crack. She quickly lost control. She says she dropped out of high school when she was 16.
"I felt very lost and felt like I found feeling of belonging and acceptance in the wrong crowd," she said.
This pattern of addiction followed Perez until she moved to Ashburn outside Washington in 2006. Everything was going well. She was engaged, she was in recovery and got her first real job at the administrative office at the Smithsonian.
"She's very driven and always has a goal in mind," said Kirk Windsor, Perez's roommate. "I knew that about her since the first day I met her. She's like a sister to me. But everything she does is so extreme."
So when Perez's ex-fiancé relapsed into his heroin addiction in 2008, she collapsed along with him. The two broke up, and it left Perez back in the dark. That's how she ended up at the drug den in Southwest Washington.
"Deep down that wasn't really me," Perez said. "The drugs were filling the void. The drugs were a Band-Aid."
Back at the gym on the Saturday in July, Perez started to pack up her bags. Visibly tired after finishing her workout, she was ready to start heading home. She had an early morning, driving 1 1/2 hours from her home to a specialist who combines laser therapy and disc decompression to help ease pain in the spine and joints. Ana's early days of powerlifting had taken a toll on her body, but this treatment was finally helping.
Rehab is something she is constantly willing to do for her body, spending thousands of dollars on treatment and going multiple days a week. But, traditional rehab for her drug addiction was never part of Perez's plans.
"No rehab can make you clean up your act other than you," Perez said. "It's a waste of time."
Exercise was how she broke out of her cycle of drug abuse, going to Bikram yoga classes, then CrossFit, then Muay Thai, then doing a century bike ride.
She discovered powerlifting after searching through female powerlifters on Instagram. One of her friends decided to help her train, and recorded her first lift numbers: bench (90 pounds), squat (145 pounds), dead lift (175 pounds). They are well below half of what she puts up now, less than three years later.
She discovered her strength in Bikram yoga classes.
"Oh she had this aggressive warrior face they called it," said Carol Neiler, Perez's former yoga instructor said. "She just looked really angry when she practiced, but she was learning to focus that energy and found that energy needed to lift."
Perez, who once hid in a gigantic oversized T-shirt in the back row of her yoga class, now exudes confidence and is willing to open up about her past.
"Before lifting I was not a confident person," Perez said. "I was very anxious and doubted myself. I am confident now."
She jumps into everything headfirst, including her current job, where she works as the chief operations officer at Let's Do Video, a news site covering business communications. She works remotely, so she can build her life around powerlifting.
She also has a remote powerlifting coach, Steve Goggins, who is based in Atlanta. Perez started training under Goggins almost a year ago and broke the Virginia state records after just seven months of his training. She sends Goggins, the first powerlifter to squat 1,100 pounds, videos of her top lifts during practice sessions.
And Saturday at The Shop Gym was no different.
After sending Goggins the videos of her workout, she headed out of the open air warehouse and into her car with one thing on her mind: strawberry Pop-Tarts.
Pop-Tarts, she claimed, work great as a pick-me-up after a workout, fueling her with the sugars she needs after sweating so much in a hot and muggy environment.
"This is how it ends," said Perez, laughing as she took a bite of the Pop-Tart. "Outside a gas station, with me eating Pop-Tarts. I guess it's fitting."