Joni Hurley

From the Daily Press:
To win the bodybuilding competitions that Joni Hurley enters, don't show up with bulging muscles a la Arnold Schwarzenegger. Judges will be way more impressed by toned, shapely, lean and firm.

So Hurley - a mother of three, stepmother of two more, school bus driver and wife of a guy who doesn't much like the gym - has sweated her way to a chiseled 110 pounds on her 5-foot-2-inch frame. Even so, she didn't expect to make much of an impact when she entered her first contest earlier this month.

Instead, Hurley placed first overall and now is training for the Virginia State Bodybuilding & Figure Championships, to be held Sept. 10 in Roanoke.

"I was so nervous before I went on stage," she said, "but afterward everyone was telling me that I need to keep competing and step it up a notch. I left really excited."

Hurley, 37, competes in a relatively new category of bodybuilding called "figure," which doesn't require either oversized muscles or performance of dance or gymnastics routines. Participants have to pose, turn and flex all of their muscle groups.

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