To celebrate more than a decade as Perry’s premier personal trainer, Marsha McCaulley hosted a retirement reception Wednesday morning at the McCreary Community Building in Perry, the place where she has shown many local students the agony and ecstasy of physical fitness.
Many friends and former students dropped in during the three-hour party, and Marsha’s husband, Dr. Randy McCaulley, dutifully took pictures of each guest in turn while visitors chatted and enjoyed coffee and donuts after unthawing from the brutally cold outdoor temperatures Wednesday.
will be Perry’s representative in the 2015 Mrs. Iowa – America Pageant. The pageant represents the contemporary married woman who strives to reach greater heights of achievement in all areas of our society and provides strength and inspiration to the family unit.
Marsha McCaulley began her own fitness and bodybuilding odyssey in 1987 and came to train more than 100 women and men over the last 30 years. The former special education teacher remembers clearly when she started.
“It was 30 years ago, in March 1987,” she said, “about six weeks after Shane was born in January.” Shane McCaulley is the youngest of the couple’s three children, with the eldest a sister, Katie, and brother, Tony.
The couple was living in Fremont, Iowa, at the time, Marsha said, where Randy was a teacher and coach, so he introduced her to weightlifting and aerobics as ways to attain post-parturition tone.
Marsha got the weightlifting bit between her teeth and by the 1990s was a drug-free bodybuilding champion. As recently as 2015, this grandmother of six was an entrant in the Mrs. Iowa Pageant, held in conjunction with the Mrs. Minnesota and Mrs. Wisconsin Pageants and staged at the Bloomington Theatre and Art Center in Bloomington, Minn.
“It was a bucket-list event for me,” she said, “and also a way to challenge stereotypes and show them that age doesn’t matter. They weren’t expecting a 62-year-old woman.” She said she enjoyed her behind-the-scenes glimpse of pageant production.
In 2014 McCaulley spearheaded the Iron Women of Perry fundraising calendar, which netted more than $10,000 for new workout equipment at the MCB. She and six of her clients — Perry athletes Sherri Miller, Jill Dorman, JoAnn Harmelink, Cheri Scheib, Stephanie Hansen and Cindy Sohn — composed the Iron Women of Perry team, which gained notoriety by promoting the calendar on Des Moines television stations.
“I’ve always been one to be up and going,” she said. “I love to be outside and active, so you won’t often find me indoors reading or sewing or cooking.” She now sports a knee brace but still likes to walk, run bleachers and play golf with Randy.
McCaulley’s philosophy of lifelong fitness will not change after retirement. She said she will still be regularly seen working out at the MCB and embodying her motto: “Age is only a number.”
