If this is the end for Mike Gustavsson, it sure doesn’t look like it.
Sitting in The Motivator Personal Fitness and Training Gym on the east side of Tucson, this is not a man ready to give up the limelight.
He is huge, unfathomably ripped, his muscles bulge like a basketball in a vice, his veins the size of large snakes, and there are dozens of them. Refrigerators look at him in envy. Illegal documents are less shredded. He is tanned like Donald Trump could only dream of being. We’re talking a George-Hamilton-on-the-French-Riviera tan. He glistens, and he’s not even painted up.
What he lacks in height, the 54-year-old Swede makes up for in sheer brawn. Picture a bunch of water balloons with rubber bands in the middle, configured into the shape of a human. Or a cyborg, because he really doesn’t look like he can be real. There’s too much sinew, too much raw … muscle. Popeye, only he ate the entire spinach factory.
He is less than a week away from competing in the 2016 World Fitness Federation Universe competition, held on Saturday in Orlando, Florida, the first time the event has come to the United States. He says this is his last competition, after on-and-off performances for nearly 30 years.
But can he really give it up?
• • •
Tanya Gustavsson doesn’t buy it.
“Every time he does a show, he says it’s the last show, and I’ve been with him for seven years,” Gustavsson said. “It’s not his last show. I’ll believe it when he hangs up the banana hammock.”
It takes a certain type of person to become a bodybuilder, and it takes a certain type of person to marry one, too.
Not that Tanya knew what she was getting into.
“I didn’t!” she said. “I never really ever followed it, didn’t understand it, thought they were a bunch of meatheads. But to see the amount of dedication — they’re just like any other athlete. It’s a whole lifestyle.”
They met through an online dating service, and their first date was at a Super Bowl party, even though he’s not much of a football fan. At that point he hadn’t done a show in a while, but he wanted to get back into it, and Tanya got a little insight into his world.
“That first show I went to, I was amazed,” she said. “I was amazed by the transformation. It was a shock. I don’t know what I was expecting. But it’s hard to put into words how proud and grateful I am to be married to him. Not everyone can do that. To know I have some support in that, that means the world to me.”
Mike put it bluntly: “Without her, I could not do the show.”
She is an integral part of his intricate pre-show routine, but even more, she serves as his inspiration.
And he hers.
“That’s what I fell in love with: the ambition and the drive and the dedication,” she said. “The mindset he has. It’s so passionate. He’s so passionate about what he does. It’s amazing. I don’t even know how he can wrap his mind around it. I fell in love with that type of guy. It was perfect.”
He tells her he is ready for the show to be over, but she can’t believe it.
“You should see the look he gets in his eyes when he gets ready to get on that stage,” Tanya said. “He loves it. He may complain while he’s going through it, but this is his life.”
• • •
It takes a heck of a lot work to pull this off.
Gustavsson is asleep by 8 p.m. and up by 4 a.m. for his first meal of the day; during training season, it’s usually fish. Then more fish, some fish, a little fish, and more fish. Usually six times a day. When he gets bored and he doesn’t want to eat fish, he’ll throw some in the blender with Diet Coke and he’ll chug.
Work.
He spends his days either training his personal fitness clients or training himself, trying to add one more bulge, one more pop, one more ooh, and another ah.
He’ll train three months for a single show, eating 1,700-to-2,300 calories a day, six days a week.
Saturday is his cheat day. He’ll consume 6,000 calories and not one of them will be ill-tasting.
Oh man, you should see his eyes light up. The Hope Diamond has less twinkle.
“When I start dieting for a show, I get very, very strict six days a week, and on the seventh day I only eat junk food, morning to night,” he said. “If you go low-calorie to shed fat, your metabolism stops. I like to kick-start it again.”
Just reading the hypothetical menu aloud requires a shot of insulin.
“Waffles with ice cream in the morning,” he said. “A whole loaf of French bread with Nutella, some cheese, sausages. Then I may go to have a pizza somewhere and straight to Five Guys for a burger, then Dunkin Donuts.”
He believes in this whole-heartedly, and this must be one big heart.
“You can get away with it! I ate junk food last Saturday, and the show is in a week,” he said. “You need to have discipline, but also distance. If you don’t have that, you get too absorbed by the lifestyle, and it’s going to eat you up.”
• • •
Gustavsson was born and raised outside of Stockholm, Sweden; he grew up playing basketball and soccer before getting into motorcycles. He wanted to improve his strength for the bikes. When he was 15, he saw an American magazine with Arnold Schwarzenegger on the cover, and he thought to himself, “Damn, I want to look like that.”
Not everyone got on board instantly. Bodybuilding, powerlifting — these weren’t really things in Sweden, 1976. He went to the local gym, or rather, the local barn, which had some free weights, dumbbells and an old bench. He started lifting, though, and tried to explain it to his parents.
It took some convincing.
“I come home with these magazines, and it’s guys in Speedos instead of Playboys, and it was like, ‘What’s wrong with you, son?’” Gustavsson said.
He saw instant results, sold his bike and, as he says, “gave it all into bodybuilding.”
Two years later, he competed for the first time.
“This was it,” he said. “I was hooked.”
What was it that so captured him? He had grown bored of stick-and-ball sports; in bodybuilding and weightlifting, he found both the individual glory and the responsibility that came with it.
“If the team won, everybody won, and if somebody screwed up, I lost, too,” Gustavsson said. “This was just for me. What I put in, I could get back. If I lost, it was my fault, and I had to be better the next time.”
And he did.
He weighed 90 pounds when he started his new pursuit; within two years, before his first show, he was up to 220.
Gustavsson finished 16th out of 30 competitors that first year, and he knew he was still too skinny, too uncoordinated, too unsure of himself on stage. Judges base their ratings on body symmetry, proportionality, muscle definition and presentation, and it is in the last category that Gustavsson particularly lacked.
“Look, no one could teach you,” he said. “I looked in the magazines, and it was like, ‘OK, I’ll try to copy that.’ ”
But he wasn’t discouraged. “The next day, I was back in the gym to do exactly the same show next year,” he said.
He placed seventh. Then up to third, second, first, then he went international, and made it all the way up to a second-place finish in the Mr. Scandinavia contest of 1992.
Gustavsson took time off after that, achieving more in the sport than he’d ever hoped, going places he’d never dreamt of going. In 2002, he was living in Belgium but decided to visit a friend, Peder Johansson, in the United States — Tucson, to be exact. He never went back. He saw an immigration lawyer, got a green card, and eventually, his citizenship.
Gustavsson longed for the stage, though, and worked himself back into playing shape.
His first show in Arizona, he placed second or third — he can’t remember — and the next year, he won. The following year, too. He went to California, and won. He won both his age group and the overall competition at nationals. In 2015, he traveled to South Africa for the WFF World Championships and finished fifth in the Masters (over-50) category.
But after suffering an emergency hernia and an inflamed gallbladder, Gustavsson didn’t feel like he was able to give last year’s effort 100 percent. The doctor told him not to train for seven weeks, and he was back at it two days later, but he wasn’t his best.
“That was supposed to be the last show, but since I had the surgery, I couldn’t do exactly what I wanted, and I said let’s do it one more time,” he said.
One more time. Ha.
• • •
If this really is the end for him, a big if because although he says he is ready to dedicate himself to his wife and his two dogs — “my life and my wife,” he says — nothing is going to replace the bright lights.
Well, maybe another person’s.
“I came to him; he never asked me to do a show,” Tanya said. “He was almost in tears when I said I wanted to do a show.”
Yes, Tanya, a self-proclaimed running junkie, has now stepped onstage and competed in a bodybuilding show, in March. Mike trained her, and she has fallen in love with the sport like he did all those years before.
“It’s gotten me to be more mindful of what I put in my body,” she said. “I never at 51 thought I’d be doing bodybuilding shows; I really love it. I’m addicted to it. The dieting, I hate it. But I love the workouts. I didn’t realize I’d like it so much. I focus — I think that’s what drove us together, too. When I get my mind set on something, I don’t stop, and he’s the same way, too.”
He trains people for a living, and he’s eager to continue helping Tanya reach her goals in the sport.
He’s gotten into target shooting, which is a good outlet for his competitiveness. It’s got to go somewhere.
He’s ready to live a more well-rounded lifestyle — less logging of every bite of food into a journal, more spontaneous trips, even if just to a summer barbecue — and the expenses of bodybuilding are not exactly small, though he has a pair of reliable sponsors in the Rodriguez Hestekin Law Firm and Diamond Ventures Real Estate of Tucson.
Now just might be the time.
“Where can I take it after Mr. Universe?” he said. “Go back to a local show? If I don’t win, I could always go back to try again, but when would it stop? But you never know … ”
He trails off.
“I’m actually very scared to step off stage,” he said. “It’s been my life since the 70s. It’s been my life.”
