Kenwood bodybuilder finds inner strength

“I was always a little skinny thing,” says Catt Tripoli, 58, a fitness trainer, author and world champion body builder. “When I discovered weight-lifting in my 20s, I went, ‘Woah! This is powerful stuff!’”

Tripoli lives in Kenwood and is the owner of Powerhouse Gym in Santa Rosa. She recently published her first book, “Conscious Fitness: Strength Training for the Evolution of Mind, Body and Spirit.”

“Everything I’ve learned about becoming a stronger person, inside and out, is in that book,” she says.

Born in the town of Big Bear, in the mountains of Southern California, she grew up in Porterville, in the San Joaquin Valley, where she spent a lot of time riding horses and swimming in the rivers.

“It’s kind of an armpit now, but back then it was great!” she laughs.

Tripoli came to Sonoma County 36 years ago, after meeting a Santa Rosa businessman who was there on a dive trip. He was a diver, a weight-lifter and an enthusiastic runner.

“I was 22 years old at the time, and I’d never really done anything athletic,” says Tripoli, who admits that a strict religious upbringing was part of the reason she’d never done much exploring outside the familiar day-to-day of her life. Inspired and encouraged to finally focus on her own physical-fitness, Tripoli started running with her new friend.

“I hated it,” she says. “I was so bad at it. After a while, he said, ‘Well, why don’t you try lifting weights?’” It was a time when there were only a handful of gyms in the area, so her first experience with free weights was in her friend’s makeshift weight room in the back of the countertop fabrication shop he ran.

“It had this home-made bench, made out of plywood, and green shag carpeting,” Tripoli recalls. “I tried out the weights, and I immediately fell in love with it. I was good at it right away. I loved the changes I noticed in my body.”

To see that happen, she allows, was a turning point in her life.

“Having grown up with a feeling of powerlessness, it was a major moment for me,” Tripoli says. “Until then, I thought we just were what we were, but now I knew that change was possible. That we can literally shape-shift our bodies, and in doing that, can shape-shift our lives.”

At that time, the serious fitness gyms were primarily populated by men – women generally being drawn to aerobic exercise through programs like Jazzercise. Tripoli joined a small gym in Santa Rosa, and before long was working out every day.

“I ended up managing the place,” she says.

Eventually, she was encouraged to try competing as an amateur-level bodybuilder, a thought she says would never have occurred to her before, still identifying as she did with the shy, reserved girl from Southern California. But when she began winning awards for her bodybuilder routines, her life took another turn.

“The body building thing just snowballed,” she say. “I went from winning little state competitions, to winning national competitions, to winning world competitions. I eventually went pro, and did that for a long time.”

Competing under the name of Cathey Palyo, she earned numerous titles, including winning the overall title at the Ms. Universe competition in Singapore, in 1986. Two years later, she won the Ms. International contest, an achievement she now considers the highlight of her pro bodybuilding career. Along the way, she appeared on the cover of many major fitness magazines, including Muscular Development and Muscle & Fitness, and dozens more in Belgium, France, Mexico, the Netherlands and Greece. Tripoli was just the second woman bodybuilder to ever appear on the cover of Flex magazine, considered the most prestigious bodybuilding publication in the world.

It was, she admits, a wild ride. And not always a fun one.

“There are a lot of things about professional bodybuilding that aren’t fair,” she says, specifically pointing to her own attempts to defy rules that seemed stacked against women. Those stories are related in her book.

“I finally got tired of all of that, and decided to open up my own gym in Santa Rosa,” she says. “I decided I wanted to take some of the things I’d learned over the years, and use them to help other people reach their own potential, to feel strong in whatever way that means to them.”

The book was born of that same desire.

“My hope is that the book changes the way people think of physical fitness,” she says. “It’s not just about lifting weights and building muscle. It’s also about being conscious, about using your mind and your spirit to find strength, inside and out. Training, whatever your age or your particular goals, is all about establishing a sense of communion with your body, a partnership between you and your body that, I believe, can take us to a much deeper level than most people think possible. It’s certainly been that way for me.”

Email David at david.templeton@sonomanews.com.