Sarah Brown
Pam Walker would tell you she started her athletic career when she was in the third grade, while she attended Holley
Elementary.
“I was out there runnin’ around on the playground and was discovered by a teacher that was a track coach,” she said.
That led her into a life of track and sports and competitive bodybuilding. Now 56, Walker looks back and thinks maybe she did all that because she felt a need to protect herself.
“I think it stems way back in childhood,” she said. “I can kinda look back and go, ‘I can see why I needed to be so strong.’ I think that’s why I got into the bodybuilding, because then nobody could hurt me. But it’s my love, too. It’s what I love to do, and I love helping people.”
After 30 years as a personal trainer and fitness instructor throughout California and
Oregon, Walker now teaches at Steelhead Fitness.
“I want women to know they could be on their own and they could be strong. They don’t need other things telling them what to do, or push them around.”
Her whole life is a series of interesting stories, and she’s working on a book about it all, but it could all be summed up in something she recently said.
“Some people are just born with bad luck, but it’s how you deal with the bad luck (that matters).”
But she’s had some good turns as well.
When Walker was in the fourth grade, she began running track with the junior high kids. By the time she reached junior high, herself, she started to set her own track records, which to this day have yet to be broken.
“I still hold five records here in Sweet Home at the junior high, and at the high school there’s a couple of them still on the board,” she said.
She was also a member of a state championship team in the Eugene softball league, Andy’s Aces, and later helped get a girls team started at Sweet Home High School, in 1982.
As a senior, Walker made up one of four girls in track known as the “Fearsome Foursome.” Under Coach Alan Temple, the track team set six school records and two all time Class AA state records, and won the state championship in 1983.
“We were the first team to ever go under four minutes in the mile relay, and I had a split of 56 seconds, running a 400,” Walker said.
She tried out for the 1984 Olympics, but when she didn’t make it, she went on to run track at the University of California, Irvine.
“That’s where I got all involved in my body building and lifting weights, because that was pretty strong down there,” she said.
When she returned to Oregon, she had earned eight body-building trophies and was sporting the Venice Beach bodybuilder’s look.
“That was when I was huge. I had just gotten done competing. I had my hair all cut short. My hair was all spiked. I mean, I was a Californian.”
Walker continued as a personal trainer and track coach while raising her son, and also took a job as a corrections officer at Oak Creek Youth Correctional Facility. Around that same time, though, a knock on her head ended up saving her life.
She was teaching a weightlifting class through Linn-Benton Community College, demonstrating a technique on a weight machine with 130 pounds of iron on the stack. As she brought the bar toward her head, the cable connecting the weights to the bar snapped.
“The bar had a bolt that was in the center of the thing, so when that snapped and came down, it went through my head. The cable snapped and it just went ‘boom!’ and hit the top of my head.”
Blood went everywhere and Walker was in shock, but she tried to remain calm for her students’ sake, she said. Doctors performed a head scan to check for brain damage or other trouble, but instead found a mass the size of a golf ball.
It was a brain tumor on her right frontal lobe.
The surgery to remove her tumor went well, but it returned a few years later. They again removed as much of it as they could, and then put her on chemotherapy for two years, she said.
“That was a killer; it was horrible,” Walker said. “So, (after) two brain surgeries and chemotherapy, I lost a lot of (muscle) mass, but I’m getting it back; it takes a long time.”
Still, at the time, the doctor gave her two years to live. Walker began keeping a journal for her son, and praying that God would keep her alive at least until he graduated high school.
“There was so much going through my mind. My son was my number one focus. Knowing that I was gonna die, I was just trying to stay strong and as positive as I could for my son, hoping he wouldn’t give up on anything.”
While she admits the two struggled for the next few years, both of them came out on the other side of it all. That was 15 years ago, and her son is now 30.
Last year, Walker was attacked in Albany by a violent criminal who had recently been released on parole, she said. She was certain he would kill her, but a passerby rescued her in time. She came away from that incident with a broken leg.
She continues with training, and also teaches a Better Bones and Balance class in Lebanon for aging adults.
Walker recently moved back into Sweet Home to help her parents.
“It’s a nice little community. Everywhere I’ve been, I would’ve never thought I’d want to come back to Sweet Home. But it’s home,” she said.
She has enjoyed running into familiar faces, and was happy to also see Alan and Debbie Temple, both of whom had coached her in her formative years.
She said she told them that she’d suffered nerve damage in her feet from workouts, but he’d made her a champion.
She said the best life lesson she took away from her coach was this: to never give up on her hopes and dreams, to never give up thinking she can’t be the best she can be.
And she tries to pass those lessons on to others.
“I enjoy helping others and making them feel good about themselves and never giving up. It’s not about how great a shape you could be in; it’s just feeling good about yourself,” she said.
She also wants to help young people who may have had a terrible childhood and have a lot of hard decisions to make as they grow out of childhood.
Walker said she wants to finish a book she started a while back. It’s about a little girl who has bad dreams about running through a tunnel to escape a werewolf-man, and having to make a decision to jump into the unknown or stay and be eaten.
She said a professor had told her the book could help a lot of kids.
“That’s when I kinda stopped because I want to think about how I’m gonna finish this where it will help kids into their adulthood,” she said.
Regardless of the “bad luck” Walker has experienced throughout her life, her passion and laughter remain genuine. She cites bodybuilding as a healer both inside and out, and growing up in a town with coaches who taught her to work hard.
“I’m a small-town girl,” she said. “Hard work, and I’m not a foo-foo girl.”