Look, if you had one shot or opportunity

To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment

Would you capture it or just let it slip?

–’Lose Yourself,’ Eminem

Mom was making her daughter a protein shake. Her 10-year-old daughter. It was September 7, 1996. Marche Dickerson—then that child—remembers because it was the day Tupac Shakur, a transformative voice in hip-hop and one of her favorite artists, was shot. “It was,” she recalls, “breaking news.” Six days later, we all know, Shakur died.

Dickerson also remembers the shake. Or shakes. Because mom made them often—canned Boost or Ensure shakes usually. Sometimes “fake shakes,” as Dickerson calls them now, concoctions of ice cream, eggs, and such. Mom made them because her only child inherited her father’s thin, thin, thin frame, not mom’s, shall we say, thickness. “I was always a smaller child—skinny,” she says. “I was like ‘Mom, you’ve got all this weight and you didn’t give me any. You could’ve passed some to me. You have all this booty. I need some booty.”

Instead, mom gave her daughter shakes. “She was always trying to put weight on me, making sure I didn’t look skinny and sick,” Dickerson says. “So, for a lot of my life, I was kind of conscious of my weight.”

The teasing didn’t help. As she grew older, even after competing in track and dance at Smith Middle School in Birmingham, and later as she earned a journalism degree (with a dance minor) at Auburn, Dickerson was poked because of her frame. “People made smart remarks,” she says. “As there’s fat shaming, there’s skinny shaming. It goes both ways. You’d think it was rude if I said, ‘Oh, you’re looking so fat today.’ People would say, ‘Oh, you’re so skinny.’ That’s not good. It can affect a person mentally.

“You don’t know what my goals are. You don’t know what I’m struggling with. You don’t know what I’m trying to do in my life or why I’m skinny—why I can’t gain weight. It’s a different end of the same spectrum.”

Dickerson is still conscious of her weight, though now she’s far from ashamed of her body. At first glance, you might still want to hand her a protein shake—or a burger and fries. No need. This Saturday (Aug. 26), Dickerson, now 37 years old with a six-year-old daughter with husband Damonde, will compete in the NPC Alabama State Championships bodybuilding competition in Gadsden.

A national qualifier in several categories, Dickerson will compete in the Women’s Bikini Masters 35+ division. It will be the fifth competition since 2018. In 2021, she finished 1st in the Masters 35+ and Open Classes and was the Open Bikini overall champion at the NPC Rocket City Bodybuilding Classic in Huntsville. Dickerson is coached by Haley Lisenba of Dynasty Athletics in Birmingham and has been training six days a week in Mountain Brook.

His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy

There’s vomit on his sweater already, mom’s spaghetti

He’s nervous, but on the surface, he looks calm and ready

To drop bombs…

“That’s how I felt before my first and second shows,” she told me in a text message. “My palms are sweating as I type this.”

The 5′1″ Dickerson aims to weigh 103 pounds when she takes the stage on August 26th. That’ll be down from a peak of 115 reached during training. The irony of having to lose weight if not lost on her. “It’s quite interesting,” says the woman who didn’t gain the “freshman 15′ at Auburn, then celebrated the following summer after reaching 100 pounds for the first time ever.

“That was like a big time,” she says laughing. “Like a special time for me. ‘Oh my gosh, I finally hit 100 pounds.’”

At Auburn Dickerson channeled her athletic passion into dance and band and hitting the gym. “Training in the hot sun at band camp at five ‘o’clock in the morning, yeah, weight training to keep my stamina up and be able to endure the long hours.”

Weight training helped her reach 100 pounds, but she learned her workouts were all wrong. She was killin’ her weight-gaining goals with cardio overload. “I had friends to tell me, ‘Marche, if you want to get thick in the right places you need to lift heavy—and not be on the treadmill for an hour,” she says.

Dickerson began pursuing bodybuilding after the birth of her daughter—after not getting the “childbearing hips” mom told her she’d have after becoming pregnant. “She said, ‘You’ll put some weight on then,’” Dickerson says. “I’m like, ‘Well, I have a child now Mom, you lied to me.”

It wasn’t long after Dicker altered workouts to include more heavy lifting and less calorie-torching that she began to feel, and see, a shift. “It really hit me, ‘Oh, my friends were right,” she says. “So, this has just been a learning process, learning my body. Learning how I eat and what I need to eat. The mental part of it, as well.

“Bodybuilding has made me look deeper at myself and learn more about myself. I learned a whole lot about my faith, and my body—my physical temple.”

Dickerson is a member of Rock City Church in Birmingham (full disclosure, so am I). In her inaugural competition, Dickerson placed fourth in Bikini Open Class A and third in Bikini Novice—which sparked her to think that after her roles as mom and wife, bodybuilding stages were where God meant her to be. To not be ashamed of the body He gave her.

“I was like, ‘Okay, maybe this is my thing’,” she recalls. “If it wasn’t God’s plan he wouldn’t have allowed me to place as high as I did. My first thought was, maybe there’s something more to this passion. Let’s do this. It really sparked me to try again, to move forward with it.”

The moment, you own it, you better never let it go.

–Eminem

And I believe

That it’s my time…

I can feel it…

Breakthroughs in the room

It’s yours if you want it

And it’s gonna be big

–“Big,” Pastor Mike Jr.

Our pastor, Mike McClure, Jr, will smile at reading Dickerson’s convergence of his lyrics, now her motivational song, with Eminem’s-and bodybuilding.

“I learned that I can’t do anything, can’t Excel or reach a high level in anything in life, without Jesus, without God, and without leaning on Him,” she says. “I can’t stray. Pastor Mike said, ‘You’re different.’ Bodybuilding has solidified that for me because it is not only my challenge different—I’m trying to gain weight, to move up the scale while everybody else is trying to move come down the scale—it’s revealed to me, ‘Yeah, your path is a little a little different.’

“It has definitely strengthened my walk with Christ, definitely brought me closer. It confirmed I can’t do anything, none of this, without the Lord.”

As she sits outside the gym most mornings—training starts as early as 5 a.m.—she gives thanks for simply arriving, for being there amid the challenges of wife, mother, and life.

“Just being able to make it to the gym is an accomplishment,” she says. “Being able to make it to the [competition] stage is an accomplishment. Every aspect of it is an accomplishment. I’m thanking God I even make it to the gym, think, ‘God thank you for another chance to be here, I don’t take it for granted.

“Let’s do this. If I want to be a pro, I have to train like a pro. Let’s get it on.”

With nary an ounce of shame.

More columns by Roy S. Johnson

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I’m a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary, a member of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame, and winner of the Edward R. Murrow prize for podcasts: “Unjustifiable,” co-hosted with John Archibald. My column appears in AL.com, as well as the Lede. Check out my new podcast series “Panther: Blueprint for Black Power,” which I co-host with Eunice Elliott. Subscribe to my free weekly newsletter, The Barbershop, here. Reach me at [email protected], follow me at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj