Ali Harris

I know two people named Ali. One was in the business of knockouts—Muhammad Ali—and the other is a knockout, Ali Harris, and I think Ali Harris is a more rounded athlete. At 26 years old this girl has been a swimmer, a track star and a college volleyball player. She also just ran four marathons in 15 months in an attempt to qualify for the Boston Marathon. “That’s when I started to take fitness very seriously,” she says.

Can’t disagree—running a four-hour marathon every four months sounds like it’s on its way to serious. After the Los Angeles Marathon in 2007 Ali decided to move to strength training and high-intensity cardio.

She discovered lifting in high school and found it fun and challenging. She reached the level of being able to bench-press her own bodyweight. Ali went on to college, which included studies at the University of St. Francis, Purdue University and Oxford.

When she was at Oxford, she made her way up Mount Snowdon, the highest peak in Wales, where Sir Edmund Hillary trained to climb Mount Everest.

Ali discovered BodyBuilding.com through her sister, pro volleyball player Angie Akers, and then decided that she should start a BodySpace profile for herself. She wanted a place where she could meet like-minded people, talk about mutual interests in fitness and learn about and have a support group for her new interest, figure competition.

She loves being in the gym and working out, but she’s found some differences in training for figure competition from what she had already done. Diet is the biggest issue; she used to be able to eat anything, although she always ate healthfully. Ali thinks that training for a marathon or volleyball was easier than figure competition. It’s been six years since she’s had a Dodger dog, she says. The L.A. Dodgers will never be the same.

You can visit Ali on her BodySpace at http://bodyspace.com/AliHarris.

—Ian Sitren

Editor’s note: To obtain more BodySpace bodies and info, go to www.Bodybuilding.com.