Local fitness instructor, fitness competitor and athlete Laurie Dickson is having a remarkable re-emergence into the competitive world.
Having been retired from active fitness competition for the past eight years, Dickson decided to take to the stage once more. In October, 2023, she competed in the USBF Pro Master Championships in Peoria, Illinois.
But that’s not all Dickson has on her competitive plate. As well as running her personal training service Aspire2BFit, training15-20 clients a day at the Prestige Rocky Mountain Resort, Dickson has taken on the presidency of the World Fitness Federation, and is also looking to compete with Team Canada in Amateur Long Drive this year.
Dickson’s decision to come out of retirement last year followed some personal life changes, and also an interest in seeing where she was at, physically.
“I really wanted to see what my body was still capable of as I matured,” she said.
For the October championships, she attained “the best physique I’ve ever created. It took me eight months. I really planned it. I did the diet, trained with my son. My children were very encouraging — they were my team, along with other people.”
Not only that, Dickson chose to enter the Illinois competition in Pro Figure — a difficult category. While she has spent the past years training others for competitions, not only had it been eight years since she herself had competed, it had been 15 years since she’d competed in Figure. In Illinois, she was the only one who had not been competing steadily up to the event. She still took fourth place.
“I was really happy with that,” she said. “And I was the only Canadian there, representing our province and our city.”
Since then a lot has happened. Dickson is now President of the World Fitness Federation (WFF), an international bodybuilding organisation and association for athletes formed in 1968. (The WFF promotes classic or athletic bodybuilding with a focus on the aesthetic quality of the physique, as opposed to just muscularity.)
In this regard, Dickson scouts competitors to represent B.C. and Canada in WFF competitions, and she herself will be competing in Las Vegas for the WWF World Championships in November.
Dickson is also looking to take her love of golf to another level — in particular, long drive.
Long drive, also known as long ball, is a competition based on distance and trajectory — basically, the straighter and longer the drive the better. Precision is key.
“It’s a lot of fun. I decided to do it at the Western Canadian Championships a few years ago, and I won. I always wanted to try it. I never thought I would like it, because it’s not a speed sport. But I really love it.
“It’s quite interesting, and I find the camaraderie is so fun, because it’s serious — but not too serious. It’s a different atmosphere than a typical golf game.”
A golf drive engages a lot of musculature, and requires a great degree of physicality. It requires a lot of power through the hips, a lot of core integration, and a lot of supination [rotation of the hips]. Dickson found she had to correct a tendency to over-supinate, or over-rotate the hips, habits she’d developed from her fitness competitions.
The golf pro at St. Eugene Golf Resort, Cindy Soukoroff, has been giving Dickson a lot of help getting her long drive down.
Dickson’s goal is to be on Team Canada, and compete at the World Championships, set for Columbia, South Carolina, later this year. She has been invited to try out for Team Canada Amateur Long Drive. Tryouts will be held in Calgary this winter.
“I’ll be competing in as many tournaments as possible this year,” Dickson said. “I’m honoured and proud to have been recognized by Golf Canada for making the 32 per cent range in my handicap across Canada.”