http://www.tmuscle.com/free_online_article/sports_body_training_performance_interviews/the_dark_side_of_bodybuildingPretty cool stuff. Randy really knows his stuff.
The Dark Side of Bodybuilding
by Chris Colucci
Ask a baseball fan to name a lineup of the all-time greats at each position, and he might sprain a lobe trying to choose among Mays, DiMaggio, and Mantle in center. Boxing fans could easily name a dozen great fighters of yesteryear, throwing out names like Louis, Dempsey, and Marciano. I'm sure hockey fans could name ... some important hockey guys from 60 years ago.
But ask fans of bodybuilding to name some key figures who were around before the 1960s or '70s, and chances are they'd draw a blank once they got past Sandow and Reeves. Bodybuilding may not be a traditional sport like baseball, boxing, or hockey, but it's something we're all passionate about, and it has a rich history going back to the "physical culture" boom of the early 1900s.
Randy Roach's ambitious text, Muscle, Smoke & Mirrors: Volume One, aims to correct that mistake. Roach spent more than five years interviewing, reading, researching, and tracking down 500 cited references' worth of details to explain the origins of bodybuilding, including a look at the earliest supplements, the magazines, and, most important, the basis for nutritional practices still used today.
MS&M, at 594 pages, is just the first of three volumes; the other two are well underway. But perhaps the most amazing aspect of the project is that the 49-year-old Roach went blind halfway through writing the first volume. He'd had impaired vision since he was 2, a result of Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, but his vision failed permanently in 2005.
I caught up with Roach — a computer programmer by trade — by phone at his home in Waterloo, Ontario, where, despite his visions problem, he trains himself and clients in the fully equipped gym in his basement.
