At the supermarket recently, a woman fell over in front of Peeps Nicol and practically landed at her feet. The woman had been pushing a walking aid and was large. As her husband tried to help her up, Nicol “got her under the arm, and got her back on her feet. I thought, I’m a powerlifter now. I can do this.”
Nicol is 71, and in March she entered her first powerlifting competition. She only joined the gym last year. “I feel like I’m really coming into my own. I’ve never felt this good about myself,” she says. “Maybe I was trained that way by my mother and society. I was always slightly to the back of my husband. It was his wishes … I can’t imagine doing what I am doing now in any of the preceding years.”
Nicol has multiple sclerosis and when she was diagnosed in 2005, she and her husband, Brian, a triathlete and former soldier, had a life plan that, “when I got really disabled with MS he would look after me, and push me around in the wheelchair. He cooked very well. That would be it.”
Back then, “I was shaky from the inside out, and my balance was awful,” she says. “I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be well.” But, within a few years Brian was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). “As we understood it, you have three to five years from diagnosis.”
Brian suggested a move to Spain, and he did well. “But there was no outrunning IPF,” says Nicol. “In April 2020, he died in our little sunny apartment near the Med. I promised him I would be all right. He was worried I wasn’t that strong.”
She returned to the UK, where she has two daughters from her first marriage, and now lives in a static caravan near the younger one, outside Weston-super-Mare. She didn’t have friends there, but she saw an advertisement on Facebook for the local health centre, with its pool and cafe.
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“My membership included the gym induction,” she says. She had no intention of using the gym, but TJ, the trainer who inducted her, reminded her of her younger brother. “I thought: maybe he can do something for me. I’m really unfit. I could do with losing some of the fat tummy you get after a certain age. I’ll give it a try.’’
After a few sessions using resistance machines, Nicol and TJ got talking. “I can’t remember how powerlifting came up. He said: ‘If you want to learn, I can train you.’”
“There was something about the idea that appealed. The idea of becoming bigger and stronger, and being able to look after myself. I wanted to know how far I could push it. I don’t think nature encourages women over 70 to put on muscle – or do anything much.”
When she first started training, Nicol’s ankles were so stiff she couldn’t squat, even without the bar. Now she can deadlift 55kg. In March, she went to a weightlifters’ gym for her novice competition. Brian had represented Team GB in the triathlon in the 60-64-year-old category and Nicol hopes eventually to enter an International Powerlifting Federation competition in the over-70 category.
Has she always been adventurous? “For me, having two kids was a huge adventure,” she says. “I had none of the ‘womanly skills’. I didn’t feel cut out to be a mother. Can’t really cook, don’t know how to keep house.” She met her first husband when she was 20, and they married within two months. She became a mother at 22 – a child herself, really. Later, after she married Brian, he “had always, as they say in the army, done ‘the recce’. I would go along as his acolyte.”
Powerlifting is really the first time Nicol has chosen something for herself. “It has made an almighty difference to how I feel about myself,” she says. “I can look after myself. When I’m getting to the point where it hurts so much I’m thinking: oh God, make it stop, I’m getting better at thinking: come on! This is where the strength is happening! I’m pushing through the pain. I’m becoming a proper powerlifter.”
