Bodybuilding nurse! 86 year old inspiration! Pics!

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At 86, great-grandmother Morjorie Newlin keeps pumping iron.

Fourteen years ago, when Morjorie Newlin was 72, her neighborhood supermarke had 50-pound bags of kitty litter on sale. Without anyone to help her carry the bag back to her house, she struggled mightily under the load. Never a particularl athletic woman, but staunchly independent, she decided that she had to do somethin about her deteriorating physical capabilities

Though osteoporosis was also on her mind, the septuagenarian began lifting weights-for her cat.

I want to be as independent as I can be, for as long as I can," says Newlin, a great-grandmother and retired nurse who turns 86 tomorrow. "I just want to do things for myself."

After 13 years of weight training, Newlin is more than taking care of herself. At her two-story home in Mt. Airy, Newlin, who runs up the stairs with the sprightliness of a 10-year-old, has a room dedicated entirely to plaques, certificates and trophies (some almost as tall as her) from bodybuilding competitions that have taken her as far away as Italy, France and Germany. She's won more than 40 trophies in her late-blooming career. "There are so many, I don't know what to do with all of them," she says.

"I chuckled when I saw this little old lady walk inside the gym," says Richard Brown, a personal trainer at Rivers Gym in Mt. Airy, where Newlin began her training. "I was a little leery. I was just training young athletes at the time."

http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2006-08-03/naked.shtml