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A Celebration of Achievement in My Oregon Town
The audience rose to its feet as one. It was late in the day, and a great many of us were hoarse from shouting encouragement at the folks who were on stage. Our friends, our family, folks whose journeys we’d been watching.
At this moment, however, we were honoring the journey of Zack Childers, A 31-year-old man with cerebral palsy. As a young man, Zack’s doctor told him he would never walk.
He not only walked across stage, out of the joy of his accomplishments, he ran back. Wobbly, but he ran. That he was even upright on the stage in the first place is a minor miracle. That he is actively competing as a bodybuilder is something else again. That’s what we were cheering.
The Cecil Phillips classic was held yesterday in Eugene, after having been cancelled in 2020 due to Covid. I had arrived early to document some of the preparations for the show. The staging area at Eugene Christian School was busy, the big gym overwhelmed by booths of local show supporters and the spray tanning booth where contestants were being turned berry brown for the day.
For the past three weeks I’ve attended the mid-week posing practices at Genuine Fitness, where I work with a personal trainer once a week. There, I have met and in many cases befriended people of all ages and backgrounds who had chosen the path to…
