From depressed and overweight …
Lisa Fisco was an Emmy Award-winning TV producer, with a husband and three kids. Then her husband left her, after which she went through a terrible divorce. According to More magazine, she not only had more than $800,000 in legal bills surrounding the divorce proceedings, but also gained over 100 pounds. And if that wasn’t enough, her kids decided to live with their father, sending her into a depression. She was 47 and at a crossroads in her life.
… she turned her life around …
As part of an assignment for an entrepreneurship course she was taking at UCLA, Fisco was instructed to “remember your childhood dreams,” according to AOL. That’s when she thought about weightlifting, something she used to do with her dad when she was little. Doing so motivated her to get online and send a US Olympic weightlifting coach the following email: “Hey, Coach, how would you like to take a 47-year-old, totally out-of-shape mom and turn her into an Olympic weight lifter who goes for the gold?” He wrote back that very day, with a response that blew Fisco away: “hell yes absolutely.”
… and has her sites set on London in 2012.
Now 50, Fisco is training to be the oldest female weightlifting Olympian ever (she would be 52 at the 2012 Games). According to this video on Yahoo, she trains five days a week, and has gone from being able to lift 60 pounds when she started to more than triple that amount. And, she’s lost nearly all the weight she gained. It’s hard not to be inspired by her transformation. As she says in the video, “Most people, when they’re in their 50s, or even 40s, think they can’t get out of a rut, they can’t fulfill their dreams. And I’m hoping to show them that they can go above and beyond if they put their mind to it.”
Read more Good Sports.
Screenshot by Ben Hoffmann via More.