Carmen part three




As I lay totally exhausted the next morning in the arms of my wife Carmen, my
curiosity about the progress of her workouts was piqued, and I suggested that
we work out together again some day. I think she too wanted me to see her
progress, and so we made a date to go to our gym that Sunday.

I was also amazed by and curious about her physical growth. I had never seen
someone make such a transformation in such a relatively short time. I knew she
had been working out regularly, and I knew she was working out hard. However,
I had never seen anyone make such progress in only a few months.

"That was a pretty impressive show of strength last night," I said. "How did
you manage it?"

"I've been going to the gym a lot, and I have been eating a lot of lean
healthy food," she said. "I have also discovered some stuff called creatine."

I had heard of creatine before, but I did not know it had extraordinary
effects. I mentioned that.

"It has had a pretty amazing effect on me," she said. "I recover much more
quickly than before, so I can do a lot more."

There was a pause. "What do you mean by 'much more quickly'"?

"Well, I can work the same body part for longer periods of time and do it
every other day. I am now going to the gym twice a day much of the time so I
can get a better workout, but I am less tired than I used to be from three
workouts a week."

"That explains some of it."

"Well, the rest of it is due to changes in diet. I probably eat at least four
pounds of lean meat per day as well as a lot of greens and some carbs.
Sometimes I eat a lot more. It really depends."

"You don't seem to be eating that much more when we're together," I said.

"What about that night with the chickens"? She enquired.

"Well, yeah, there was the night you ate two whole roasters, but mostly you
don't seem to eat that much."

"You come home late and we eat at 7:30 or 8:00. By then I have eaten three or
four other meals. That combined with the hard workouts has really added a lot
of lean muscle to my body. I ate a whole twelve pound turkey a week ago."

"Yeah, right!"

"I did. You want me to prove it tonight. Let's go to one of those buffet
places. I'll show you," she challenged. I needed some amusing entertainment,
so I agreed.

"I'll buy," I said.

With that she stood up and flexed again for me. It may have been my
imagination, but she looked taller as well as bigger. I mentioned it to her,
and she said "Let's find out." Reaching into the laundry basket she pulled out
one of my oxford shirts, fortunately an old one, and slipped it on. She had
always worn my shirts occasionally on days she wanted to be comfortable, and
in the past they had fit loosely. Today she not only filled the shirt out
completely, but her arms went two to three inches beyond the ends of the
sleeves and the tails of the shirt barely reached her well formed buttocks.

"Hey, this used to be loose on me," she chimed. "Wow, I must really be getting
bigger than even I thought. How's this for size"? She asked. And then I heard
a ripping sound as she first did a back lat spread and then flexed her chest
and her biceps. My nice cotton oxford was still on her body, but it looked
like something on the incredible hulk after he had morphed. It was shredded to
pieces.

"Sorry about the shirt," she said sheepishly. "But that was kind of fun."

She took off the remains of the shirt and stood on the bathroom scale. I
expected to see a big number, but I was astounded none the less. When the
weight registered on our LCD screen, the number 245 appeared in the little
window. This was on a woman who until six months ago had weighed about 170 and
had spent most of her years trying to keep weight off. The amazing thing is
that she still looked amazingly feminine, just in an incredibly muscular way.

"Impressed"? She asked kissing me softly on the lips. The bulge in my pants
was a more eloquent answer than any words I could muster. "It's odd, but I
think I have grown taller too. I don't completely understand it, but my skirts
and pants seem shorter than they were, and so do you now that I notice." She
looked down a little at me.

"There is one way to find out," I said, getting out the tape measure. Stand
against the wall. I marked the spot parallel with the top of her head with a
pencil and then measured the height from the floor. "Seventy-five inches," I
said. "That's six-three! You HAVE grown taller ... by two inches!" But every
bit of it was well proportioned and sexily female.

I looked her in the eye. She had always been taller by an inch. She had been
six-one, while claiming to be just short of six feet. I am six feet tall.
However, as I stood up to her I got a good view of her chin.

"Hmm! I wonder how that happened," I said. "You keep growing like this and
we'll have to get you a whole new wardrobe."

That night we went to Big Old Daddy's Buffet, a local joint specializing in,
well, nothing but large quantities of food. They have a couple of carving
stations and lots of other stuff. It's were people go to get stuffed with a
lot of food. We each took our tray and filled it with a couple of plates of
food. I had eaten lightly at lunch just to leave room for this feast, and I
took huge helpings of turkey and roast beef, but Carmen matched me. When we
sat down to eat I began to devour the food; she was eating slowly, and I
finished first.

"Slowing down"? I asked teasingly.

"Nope! Just taking my time."

I raced up to the food bar and got two more plates of food, stupidly
determined to make this into a competition. When I returned she looked at me
with a quizzical expression and said, "Don't you want to enjoy this?" I hadn't
thought of enjoying it. Then she got up and got two more plates of her own,
this time piled high with turkey breast and pork loin as well as stuffing and
vegetables. Her plates were piled even higher than mine, I noticed, a fact
that began to make me a bit queasy as I was halfway through the third of my
plates and beginning to regret that I had taken so much. I really began to
slow down as I neared the completion of that third plate and sat staring at
the other full plate of food. Meanwhile, Carmen just kept forking the food
down her throat, showing no signs of slowing down.

"I ran five miles of intervals today," she said. "After my lifting I went to
the track and just ran repeat half miles for about an hour. I am famished. You
know the amazing thing. I am gaining weight and strength, but I have also kept
up with my running, and my times are actually faster than they used to be."

I found that a bit surprising, even though the one sport she had done as a
youngster was track and field, and she had been a very good distance and
middle distance runner. It is difficult to gain weight and maintain speed and
endurance.

"I did ten repeats of 800 meters between 2:35 and 2:45."

I was aghast. "That's pretty fast," I said.

"Yep!" And she finished her fourth plate. You slowing down? I'm still hungry!"
And she disappeared.

A few minutes later she was back with two more plates. They were even more
full than before with lean meat and vegetables. "No carbs this time. I don't
want to get fat!"

"No," I said. "You probably don't ... where the hell do you put all that"?

"I don't know. Probably goes in here, she said as she made a move to flex her
prodigious bicep.

"Not here, darling."

She smiled. "OK. Honey. I won't show you up here." Within a few minutes she
had finished her sixth plate of food.

"You ready to go"? I queried.

She gave me a blank stare.

"No, I'm having a good time. You gonna eat that"? She asked eyeing my still
untouched fourth plate of food.

"Not if I want to get out of this chair," I replied. With that she reached
across, grabbed my plate, and finished it too, washing it down with her fourth
large glass of water.

"OK," I said. "I believe your story about the whole turkey.

"It was actually a whole turkey and a pound of lean hamburger," she said with
a sheepish grin and went back up for two more plates of food. I slumped down
in my chair.

Two days later we hauled our bodies off to the gym, and I got a look at how
strong she really was. We started in the circuit room, and I was eager to show
her how much stronger I was than the last time we worked out. The first unit
was a lat machine, actually sort of a pull up machine in which you can lighten
the load of your body by raising the counterweight. Also included as a part of
the machine are hand grips for tricep extensions. The stronger you were the
fewer plates you would use. Many people did the wide grip pull ups with eight
to ten plates. I had seen a few people do ten or so with their body weight,
but most who did that struggled to keep their form. I was feeling good so I
put two plates on the machine and stepped up to do my reps. I got fifteen reps
out, but the last few were a little weak. I heard a sweet little high pitched
giggle behind me.

"Impressed, baby?" I asked.

"Ooh, yes. You're so strong," she said with a little twinkle in her eye. With
that she stepped on the machine, removed the pin, and did twenty perfect reps.
She even got stronger towards the end and with each rep she pulled herself up
so the bar was level with her sternum, not her forehead or her nose. Then
after shaking her arms out and stretching a bit, she said, "honey, are you
willing to try something?"

"I'll try anything once," I said, ever the wise guy.

"Step up here with me and climb on my back like I'm giving you a piggy back
ride."

"What? Are you crazy"? I thought. But I did it anyway. Then she stepped up on
the machine, grabbed the bar, and proceeded to do ten reps with my 210 pounds
on her back. My big surprise was when she grabbed the tricep bars and did
fifteen tricep push-ups with me on her back.

"Hurry, honey" I said. "I am getting tired of holding on." Then I realized how
ridiculous that must have sounded to someone who was exercising with me on her
back. The rest of our warm-up consisted of me doing my personal best on each
machine for eight to ten reps and her doing the entire stack, usually five to
eight plates more than I had just done, with even greater ease for fifteen. By
the time we had finished, I was beat and a bit embarrassed.

"That was a good warm-up honey. Don't you think?" She chimed as we went to the
free weights room.

"Great!" I said, sardonically.

Feeling less than strong but wanting to impress her, I grabbed fifty-five
pound dumb bells to do my alternate arm curls. This was ten pounds more than
usual, but I wanted to make a mark. It was hard curling them, and my form
suffered. I swayed, arched my back, and grunted, drawing the attention of
everyone in the gym. After each successful contraction repetition my arm
flopped down out of control on what ought to have been the slow controlled
extension faze of the exercise. I struggled through seven reps with each arm
before failing on the eighth rep with my left arm. Still, I felt OK about it
because it was more than I had done before. Then Carmen grabbed the eighty
pounders. I watched in awe as she stood with her back to the wall to prevent
swaying or arching and did twelve steady reps with each arm, never letting the
arm speed up or slow down whether in contraction or extension. She then
graduated to the nineties and to the 100 lb dumb bells for her next two sets.
By this time the bulge in her bicep was incredible and the vein across the top
was about the size and thickness of surgical tubing. But she did not stop
there. She put two forty-fives on each end of a preacher bar and sat down at
the preacher curl bench and did three sets of fifteen curls there. Amazingly,
none of this seemed to faze her. She was neither tired, nor out of breath,
nor, it seemed, straining to achieve any of these lifts.

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said. "Did you want to use the preacher bench"?

I had stopped exercising, watching in awe, after my one set of dumb bell curls
with the fifty-fives. Sheepishly, I removed the forty-five pound plates, put a
single thirty-five pound plate on each end, and proceeded to complete two sets
of ten repetitions without too much noise. The Carmen show continued in much
the same way for the next hour and ended with her surpassing my max on the
bench press for her warm-up. She put 315 pounds on the bar and did twelve reps
with that before adding ninety more pounds for eight reps and ninety more for
another eight. After peaking at 495 she descended back to her starting weight
for sixteen repetitions.

"Are you aware that there is not a man or woman in this gym who can lift as
much as you"? I asked. "Does this not faze you in the least"?

"I guess I had noticed that nobody lifts as much as me, but I don't see why
that is so remarkable," she said.

"It is a bit unusual," I said, "because women are the weaker sex." I wanted to
take it back as soon as it was out of my mouth.

"What!"

"I ... I mean ... what I meant to say was ... "

"I don't care what you meant to say. I heard what you said." She glared at me.
"'What you meant to say' is just a cover up for politically correct BS and
lies. You said exactly what you actually meant" She stalked away and then came
back. "I'll show you who the weaker sex is."

She was pretty pissed off, and she took three more plates and put them on each
end of the bench bar. I had never seen anyone of any gender attempt to bench
585 pounds, but she was determined. She slid onto the bench under the bar,
took a few deep breaths, steadied her concentration, and raised it out of the
cradle. She paused with it extended over her chest. She knew she was
vulnerable, because I could not effectively spot her with that much weight.
Then she slowly lowered it down to her chest and paused before pressing it
strongly and steadily up to full extension. I figured she had proved her point
and started to grab the bar to help her spot it back into the cradle.

"No!" She spurted, and repeated her performance slowly and smoothly. Her chest
seemed to be growing with each rep, and she seemed to get stronger with each
one until after a total of eight, she carefully placed the weight back in the
cradle on her own. I looked at her chest. This time she was breathing hard and
as her chest heaved I noticed that there was considerable cleavage of the
muscular variety. Her pecs, it appeared to me, made Arnold Schwartzenegger's
look small by comparison. She sat up and looked at me. "I love ya honey, but
your not the stronger sex."

Who was I to argue?