SEEING IS BELIEVING From afar, pro bodybuilder Greg Rando appears to have everything a man could want from life. He does. By Jeff O’Connell Greg Rando may be a rookie pro bodybuilder, but in an era when superstars and scrubs alike throw tantrums, it’s still strange to hear gratitude pouring forth from a guy who just tied for last place. “It was amazing,” says Greg, chilling a week after the 2004 Night of Champions in the townhouse he shares with his girlfriend, a few candles augmenting the late-afternoon light. “It took me a half-hour to get out of the auditorium because I was taking pictures and signing books, and then out on the street a circle formed around me. It was unbelievable.” “Rookie” is a misnomer anyway. It took Greg, now 34, more than a decade of arduous work to become an overnight sensation. The path started in high school, when he gave up team sports to focus on weight training. He continued working out while a student at the University of Massachusetts, graduating with an honours degree in health education. Instead of teaching that subject, Greg, along with his classmate and best friend Miles Beccia, built their own classroom, so to speak, and created Boston Nutrition & Strength Centre in Stoneham, Massachusetts. Since opening in 1997, the gym has become a magnet for the local fit set. Between them, Greg and Miles train anywhere from 20–40 clients a day. The business also provided Greg with an unexpected windfall: three years ago, he met Roseanne Porcaro, a substance-abuse counsellor, when she came to the gym in search of a personal trainer. The pair have been together since. All the while, Greg has pursued his dream of becoming a pro athlete, which became a reality last May. “I’m just very lucky,” says Greg, who aims to win a professional event one day. “I live a great life. I have a beautiful home and a great business. I get up every day and head off with my best friend to go work for ourselves training a bunch of great people. I’m also following my dreams in professional sports. I can’t ask for more than that.” The Big Picture In the beginning, working out in a garage or school gym, Greg’s training was a study in trial and error. He developed tone and strength, but he wasn’t able to take his muscles to the next level. “I wasn’t efficiently using them or even safely using them,” he says. “I was training too much. I would develop injuries that I’d need to work around.” If the learning curve was a little steep for Greg, it’s understandable. It becomes an afterthought when you spend any amount of time in his presence, but he’s nearly blind, with only the slightest vision remaining out of the corner of his eyes. Standing compound exercises, such as the deadlift and squat, are particularly challenging for him. They require a spotter to help align, position and guide him in and out of racks. They’re worth the hassle, though. “What I like about free weights is that they require [the use of] additional stabilising muscle groups,” says Greg, who lays out his sentences as precisely as an instruction manual. “Being able to keep my feet up on a bench when I bench press [for example] gives me the ability to feel my back and hips on the pad. I feel like I’m in complete control of the exercise, relying on no one and no machine to help keep me there. That gives me a good sense of satisfaction.” Following on the heels of his initial frustration, Greg started gaining some traction about seven years ago, roughly the time he and Miles opened their business. Training regularly with Miles and another friend, John O’Rourke, helped Greg unlock his body’s exceptional potential for muscle growth. Another bodybuilding pal, Craig Torres, who owns a tanning salon/health-food store, increased Greg’s knowledge of nutrition. Suddenly everything started to click. “It really wasn’t till the last three or four years that I’ve felt like I’ve been making constant progress in muscle strength and size,” says Greg. “And this is all just learning how the body works, learning how to position the body so I can use it optimally, and gain maximum strength and size because the exercises are performed properly and efficiently.” So how can Greg, who requires assistance on his most difficult lifts, turn around and train others effectively? He’s taken what might seem like a limitation and turned it into his advantage. As part of the 30-minute, total-body strength-training sessions that the gym specialises in, Greg encourages clients to close their eyes to better “visualise” the muscle or muscles they’re using. To further accentuate the mind-muscle connection, he believes in palpating (placing one’s hand or hands on) a client’s working muscle. Studies have shown that touching a muscle physically stimulates its fibres, helping them to “fire”. Greg thinks this happens because the lifter is better able to zero in on the targeted muscle groups. “People enjoy that aspect of our training,” he says. “It helps the beginner and the intermediate, even, identify with different muscle groups. They can look in a book, but until you trace their muscle to feel the specific area they’re training, it’s still very unclear to them what they’re trying to accomplish. Giving them different ways to visualise and feel the muscles helps them identify very easily.” Greg’s ability to palpate a muscle is no doubt more finely tuned than most. This is a guy who monitors his bodyfat leading into a competition by feeling the thinning of his skin as his veins approach the surface. Twilight Greg’s world hasn’t gone entirely black yet, but his vision continues inching farther out to the sides as inexorably as a sunset. On the edge of the periphery, shapes and forms can still be visualised, assuming sufficient contrast separates them from what surrounds them. Detail eludes him completely, though, including the cuts and striations he’s carved into his body over the years. The vision problems that sidelined him from high school sports were caused by a sinister condition that afflicted both Greg and his older brother, Chris. When the boys were 6 and 7, respectively, their parents wondered why they kept inching closer to the television set. It took years of confusion and numerous trips to a series of leading eye experts until, 10 years ago, Greg visited one of the foremost retina experts in the world. The doctor’s diagnosis: the Rando brothers had a “non-classic” version of retinitis pigmentosa, with no known cure. Normally the disease erases vision from the periphery to the centre, but because of the unique manner in which the rods and cones in their retinas were degenerating, the brothers were losing their vision in reverse. Greg makes the most of his remaining slivers of vision, to say the least. By turning his head in specific ways, he can capture as much visual input as possible, and he augments that data with his other senses and intuition, as well as memories from when he could see clearly as a child. Over time, these techniques have compensated for his vision loss by becoming more finely tuned, enabling him to succeed at the daunting task of navigating his way around the stage for bodybuilding contests. Yet when Wayne DeMilia, promoter of the 2004 Night of Champions, asked Greg to take the stage solo, rather than as part of a group like the other competitors, the offer made him uncomfortable. It wasn’t because of the difficulties he might encounter manoeuvring onstage, but rather because it amounted to the one thing he has stead-fastly refused his entire life: a different standard because of his sight. Better that the world compares him straight-up to his competitors, without an asterisk, and give him credit just for being an outstanding pro bodybuilder. Greg doesn’t want a pat on the back; he wants to kick ass and take names. That the outward appearance of Greg’s body grows ever more impressive as his ability to see himself fades away should seem like some sort of Greek tragedy, and surely it’s a heavier weight for him to bear than anything he encounters in the gym. “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” goes the mantra of extreme sports enthusiasts and others, but forget the silly hubris of a skateboarder or ultimate fighter wearing that line on his T-shirt. To take blindness in stride and live life fully anyway — now that takes a rare individual indeed. The candles flicker down, but Greg seems unaware, or unconcerned, that darkness has nearly settled over the room. “It’s amazing to think that at one time my father could stand 50 feet away and throw a baseball to me,” he says. “Those days are long gone, but I’ve always felt that God gives these challenges to the ones who can deal with them. And I feel like without this challenge, I wouldn’t be who I am today.” M&F