The Survivors

Desmond Butler and Alice Li followed the careers of two bodybuilding coaches for more than a year. They first interviewed Candace Foxx at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s contest in March 2022, and Jason Galihadd the following month, just days after a kidney transplant.

Chapter 1

Onstage at the 2014 Texas Shredder Classic, Candace Foxx couldn’t see the crowd through the klieg lights, but she could just about make out the judges.

The 35-year-old bodybuilder flexed her muscles, focusing on the poses she’d been practicing for years. She knew that her legs were more impressive than her upper body, and her right side was better than the left.

Turning her back to the judges, she curled her arms, squeezed her shoulder blades together and opened her back muscles like a bird spreading its wings. It had taken her two years to master what bodybuilders call the “lat spread.”

After 39 athletes had performed the prescribed poses, the emcee conferred with the judges. Five finalists were called back to the stage, Foxx among them. She and her husband had agreed that if she won, she’d go to a top national contest in New Jersey. She waited.

The emcee called out fifth place. Fourth. Third.

In those moments, when the second runner-up wasn’t Foxx, when the judges named her the winner, she thought about a lifetime of trauma, and euphoria washed over her.

Foxx has what bodybuilders call “good genetics.” Once she started training, the muscles on her 5-foot-6-inch-frame quickly grew bigger and more defined. Her weight dropped to between 125 and 130 pounds. She became cut and her veins bulged. And she had a rare quality among bodybuilders: a natural stage presence and a dazzling smile.

But for all her talent, Foxx was naive about the track she was on. The shows she was competing in were overseen by the largest bodybuilding federation in the world, the National Physique Committee, or NPC. The organization does not drug test at most of its shows, and since 2017, NPC President Jim Manion has been on the Prohibited Association List of the World Anti-Doping Agency for violating the agency’s rules.

The failure to create or enforce protocols has essentially given the green light for bodybuilders, some in their teens, to experiment with a growing number of risky substances.

Foxx’s bodybuilding career was a short stretch of the road she’d traveled. She was born to a single mother from a family that had fled the cross burnings and lynchings of Mississippi in the 1950s to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. She was beaten by her mother and sexually abused by one of her mother’s boyfriends. She was a runaway, an addict, a drug dealer, an underage strip dancer and a mother — all before turning 20. The dancing got her off the streets. She earned a GED and enrolled in college with aspirations of becoming a lawyer.

Months after her win at the Shredder Classic, Foxx took the stage at the NPC Nationals Team Universe show in New Jersey, competing against top amateur athletes in the sport. Dressed in a baby blue bikini, she was in the masters’ figure division for women 35 and older, a category for slimmer and less-muscled athletes.

Bodybuilders call the run-up to a contest “peak week.” They flush the water out of their bodies, often with dangerous pills, and usually go on extreme diets to lose the last ounces of fat. The leaner they are, the better their muscles look. Under the hot lights, and despite being hungry, dehydrated and almost totally exposed, they flex their muscles as mightily as they can. The competitors perform their poses for a table of judges, mostly men, and smile throughout, often with forced grins.

Foxx had skipped the extreme measures. Instead of pharmaceutical diuretics, she took dandelion root. Instead of chemical “fat burners,” she carefully ate lean food. When she placed 11th among about 75 competitors, Foxx was delighted. In her mind, that put her in spitting distance of qualifying to be a pro with the NPC the following year or the year after that. She noticed that the top women on the stage were bigger than she was, but figured she could get there with enough time in the gym.

After Foxx had eaten and hydrated, dressed and absorbed her achievement, an NPC official stopped her to tell her how great she looked onstage.

He asked her what she was on, ticking off a list of names that sounded like pharmaceuticals. Foxx’s face made plain that she didn’t know the lingo. She mentioned the dandelion root.

The official smiled. “Oh so you are a natty,” he said, using slang for a bodybuilder who doesn’t take steroids. That was impressive, he told her, that she had gotten so far naturally. Then he said something she would never forget, because it changed her entire trajectory:

“We are not going to allow you to move up, if you are not one of us. You are going to have to start taking something.”

It was as if someone had taken her behind the curtain and explained how the sport really worked:

If she wanted to make a career as a professional bodybuilder, steroids were not an optional shortcut. She couldn’t be a natty anymore.

Chapter 2

Jason Galihadd woke up vomiting blood. As he drove himself to a Corpus Christi hospital he was worried, but not about his health. It was July 2015, and he had a contest soon.

Like Foxx, he was on the fast track in South Texas and the two bodybuilders competed in some of the same shows. Galihadd also had the genetics — he was 5-foot-8, ripped, and from his first show had commanded attention. At his peak, he competed at 175 pounds.

Someone designed him a T-shirt with the nickname “The Animal.” Other bodybuilders started calling him that. He loved it. When he was onstage, he felt transformed, like a superhero. The Animal.

The bloody vomit wasn’t the first symptom. When he was preparing for contests, his ankles would swell so much that his calves didn’t taper through the ankle to the foot. His legs looked like wooden clubs.

He kept a strict diet, cut out salt, and like many bodybuilders, took diuretics to drain fluid from his muscles so that they would appear taut under the stage lights.

But diuretics cause the kidneys to shed sodium, potassium and, with them, water. The loss of electrolytes can strain the heart, cramp the body, cause fainting and even death. Galihadd got his advice on what to take from bodybuilders, not doctors. Everyone just wanted to get huge.

The bodybuilders at the top of the sport were way bigger than he was. Galihadd wanted to live up to the name on his T-shirt. He would swell his muscles, become more intimidating, more extreme. People would drop their jaws when he walked on the stage.

At the hospital, he was admitted. They took a biopsy of his kidney and blood tests. The protein levels in his urine were off the charts. At one point, a doctor took him aside. Whatever he was taking, the doctor said, he should stop. He handed Galihadd a newspaper article about a bodybuilder who lost his kidneys from steroid abuse.

But that just made him mad. The doctors didn’t understand bodybuilders. They were wrong. He was young and strong and invincible. He was The Animal.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Chapter 3

As a little girl, Foxx would go to sleepovers with other girls. “Who’s your dad?” they would ask. “Where is your dad?”

She didn’t have an answer.

Foxx grew up in a poor neighborhood of low-slung bungalows on cinder blocks near a Black Baptist church in McAllen, Tex., smack on the Mexican border. It was called La Paloma. The Rio Grande Valley was majority Hispanic and White with only a small Black population. Her mother, Janice Fox, had dropped out of college when she got pregnant at 23 with Candace. She added an extra x to the baby’s last name on the birth certificate. Foxx instead of Fox.

When Foxx came back from a sleepover, she asked her mother about her father.

“You don’t have one,” Janice said. “You’re a test tube baby.”

A boyfriend moved into their house when Foxx was about 5 and her mother was pregnant.

“I’m your father,” the man told her. He molested her when Janice wasn’t around.

“This is what fathers and daughters do all the time,” he told Foxx. She believed him.

The abuse continued for years until the day Janice found her boyfriend on top of her 9-year-old daughter.

Instead of protecting her, Janice accused the child of seducing her boyfriend, and threw her out of the house.

One day, Foxx found 20 cents in their front yard, and brought it to her mother. Janice responded with a punch. “You stole it!”

Janice was 5-foot-10 and 225 pounds. She grabbed her daughter by the hair, pushed her against a wall. Foxx felt a knife blade against her neck. Certain her mother was going to kill her, she wet herself. That time, her mother let her go.

But Janice would often beat her bloody. Sometimes with a frying pan. Sometimes with a belt buckle. Sometimes, she would rip the hair out of her daughter’s head or throw her into a wall.

Foxx would go to school with bruises and cuts that no one asked about.

She put on a lot of weight, developed acne and started fighting. She was determined that no one would ever jump her again. She stole cigarettes from her mother and learned how to puke her food. The bulimia took the weight off.

On her 13th birthday, her real father showed up to the party. He was an attorney from Mexico who lived in Corpus Christi. She only remembers seeing him one more time during her childhood.

One day, her mother offered her a joint. Another time, they tripped on acid together, and later it was coke. Foxx started dealing at school.

The drugs took her away from her reality. She still thinks it’s what she needed then, because her reality was unbearable. She prayed, asking God why her family couldn’t be normal.

When Foxx was 15, Janice took up with another boyfriend. He came after Foxx just like the last one. This time she was big enough to fight back. But the boyfriend told her he could make up a story and complain to Janice.

“She’s going to believe me,” he said. He was right.

Janice went into a rage. They fought and tore up the house before Foxx told her mother she would never see her again.

Chapter 4

For about a year, she lived on the streets or in a car, sleeping in alleyways or wherever she could find a safe spot. Predators were everywhere. She even feared the police.

She started driving to Austin to buy sheets of acid to sell back home. It got her under a roof. She rented a one-bedroom apartment with a gang of teenagers. Twenty of them slept on the floor. It was fine with the landlord, so long as they paid.

She found a job dancing at a strip club. She was 16, but no one asked. She quickly made enough to get her own place.

One day, Foxx visited a friend who was looking after his grandmother in McAllen. She noticed a black and white picture of the grandmother competing as a young woman in a relay race. She had a baton and wore a skirt with a shirt marked “Haiti.”

“Oh, my grandmother competed in the Olympics for Haiti,” the friend said.

Foxx felt a pang of wonder. How incredible it must be to perform in front of a crowd and be cheered. She would never have that pleasure, she thought. Her mother had been a track star in high school and had been offered college scholarships only to see them withdrawn after an injury. Foxx thought that was why Janice forbade her from ever participating in sports.

“They’ll only use you until you’re no longer useful,” Janice told her.

By the time she turned 17, she’d saved enough money to quit dancing. She took a job as a cocktail waitress. A boyfriend she’d met at work moved in with her.

One day, he told her that she looked pregnant. She was: six months along. Her boss fired her for sleeping with her boyfriend, a co-worker. He kept his job, and then left her. Her car broke down.

She was pregnant, carless, jobless and soon homeless again.

Foxx thinks the news of her pregnancy brought out some buried maternal instinct in Janice, who begged her to come home. She moved onto the couch in the one-bedroom with her mother, her two half-siblings, a pair of pit bulls and a boxer. She slept on that same sofa for 18 months after she had her son. She went back to stripping and started commuting to clubs in Corpus Christi. One was called the Palace.

But she wasn’t going to dance forever. She got an apartment and a high school diploma. At 25, she won a scholarship to the University of Texas-Pan American. She reasoned that she was good at arguing, so she’d study to become a lawyer. She got married.

During her junior year, Foxx was visiting her mom when Janice mentioned that she’d found a lump in her breast.

“When did you notice?” Foxx asked.

“Six months ago.”

Foxx was angry that her mother was casual and careless. She got Janice in to see a doctor, who confirmed it was cancer. During chemotherapy, Janice was too sick to continue her job as a truck driver. Neither of them could afford a nurse.

No one was going to help except the daughter she used to beat with a frying pan.

Foxx withdrew from her classes.

Chapter 5

Galihadd’s mom was a bodybuilder and he remembers sitting in the audience at the age of seven watching her posing onstage in a small bikini. Men would hoot and holler. Galihadd didn’t like it, and he told her so.

“There’s no way I’m going to be up there in a bathing suit with my butt hanging out,” he told her.

His grandfather, a Mexican American, sent his father to a reform school, where he lived and worked under strict discipline. To make a break from his parents, his father changed his last name to Galihadd, inspired by the knight of Arthurian legend. Sir Galahad pulled the mythic sword Excalibur from the rock and led the quest to find the Holy Grail.

It was a noble name, Galihadd’s dad had told him, and he should live up to it. To the younger Galihadd, a devout Christian, it was also a godly name.

And yet, Galihadd dropped out of college after two semesters. He got a job at a TGI Fridays, bussing tables. To keep afloat, he worked security for a strip club — the Palace.

He started lifting weights and getting bigger. Galihadd found he liked being the tough guy who threw out unruly customers. He felt like he was Patrick Swayze in “Road House.”

He was about 26 when he told his mother he wanted to compete at a bodybuilding contest. He hit the weights hard and ate clean. His waist shrank. His muscles popped with more definition and bigger veins. He would rise early to train and immediately check his progress in a mirror.

The change, the hardening, felt like he was taking command of his life through hard work.

But when Galihadd started competing in the NPC, it became apparent that his genetics alone wouldn’t get him to the top. He became obsessed with being the biggest guy on the stage. Everyone told him that you had to take steroids to get that big, so he did. Very quickly, the weights lightened, his recovery shortened and his body felt superhuman. It was exactly what he wanted.

A medical expert at a testosterone treatment center showed Galihadd how to monitor his blood pressure and advised him to get routine testing.

For a while, he followed the advice, but then he skipped the precautions. He would get steroids, illegal without a prescription, from friends in the gym. He ignored the warning signs and even an emergency room doctor.

Less than a year later, Galihadd was two weeks out from a contest when his legs swelled again. He was admitted to the hospital. After lab tests, a nephrologist came to his room with the test results.

His kidneys couldn’t be saved. He would need regular dialysis until he could get a transplant.

When Galihadd got out of the hospital, he drove straight to see his coach. In tears, Galihadd told him he might never be able to compete again. To the coach, he seemed more devastated about his bodybuilding future than whether he had a future at all.

Chapter 6

Foxx walked into Gold’s Gym in McAllen at the urging of her husband. She had dropped school, but not the 45 pounds she gained there. She was caring for her mother and her son, and coping with depression.

There were racks of dumbbells and dozens of machines. Many of them were mysterious. Trainers were expensive. She watched people work out and spent hours on cardio machines with weights strapped to her ankles and wrists. It didn’t work.

People would say that food is 80 percent of the fight, but she didn’t know what that meant. Then she read bodybuilding magazines that talked about “eating clean”— natural foods, no sugar, no white grains and smaller portions, more often.

She thought about how she gorged as a teenager. The magazines said she could eat five times a day and look like the taut bodybuilders on the cover. It was worth a try.

Within a few months, she got ripped. The weight came off, her muscles grew and for the first time in her life she could see their definition. Other women in the gym noticed, so Foxx gave them advice.

One day, the manager of the gym told her to leave the training to the pros. Foxx laughed to herself.

The big men who lifted heavy weights and ran gyms were threatened by her?

Without trying, she was taking business from Gold’s Gym. Not long after, she was confronted while working out with another woman. To her astonishment, they revoked her membership.

It seemed like a sign that she was onto something. She began teaching Zumba at another gym and working on a trainer certification with the National Academy of Sports Medicine.

In 2012, she scraped up enough money to open a tiny gym. That gave her the flexibility to work and care for her mother, whose cancer had come back.

But to woo athletes to train, she needed to compete herself. She could easily outperform the former bodybuilders. One guy was so out of shape that he reminded her of a washed-up Hollywood tough guy.

She thought, if getting up on a stage would give her as much credibility as the gone-to-pot trainers, then why not? It was a business decision. She put a contest date on her calendar.

Foxx started sculpting her muscles. She would compete in the figure category, which required a V-shaped torso and a slimmer lower body. It was the opposite of her physique. She worked obsessively on her back and her arms, and when the muscles hardened it gave her a sense of structure and control over her life that she had never experienced before.

She could push herself hard. Bodybuilders talk about the satisfying pain of the workouts — “the pump,” when blood and lactic acid flood the muscles — swelling them with a burning sensation. But Foxx scoffs at the idea that it’s painful — it was nothing compared to her mother’s beatings.

Watching her own progress in the mirror was deeply satisfying to Foxx.

She started competing in contests under the amateur arm of the World Natural Bodybuilding Federation, where the drug testing was real and sometimes included lie detector tests about steroid use.

When Foxx walked onstage for the first time and executed the poses she’d learned online, the crowd began cheering and chanting her number. It was bewildering and exhilarating. She might have been too happy. When she came off the stage, a judge told her not to bug out her eyes so much.

In her first contest, she placed third. After the pictures on the podium, she dressed and walked downstairs to leave. There was a crowd chanting “Bo Derek!” She had bleached and braided cornrows like the model-actress from the movie “10.”

She remembered Derek running on the beach. Foxx’s eyes watered.

“You think I look like Bo Derek?” she asked them.

“Yes, you’re so beautiful!” one of her new fans told her. Another handed Foxx a Polaroid picture of her on the stage.

“Can you please autograph it for us?”

She signed in shock.

She remembered how she’d stuffed herself as a teenager and tried to hide any beauty in the body her mother’s boyfriend had abused. She could see herself in baggy clothes and the ugly oversized glasses she had gotten free from the Lions Club. And now a crowd wanted her autographed picture.

She also thought of the photograph of her friend’s Haitian grandmother, and how — at 17 — she thought she’d never get that chance.

Foxx was quickly moving up in the sport when an official told her that her body might be too muscular for the aesthetic of the natural federation she was competing in. Maybe she should try the NPC, he said.

As she was training for her first NPC show in 2013, her mother died. She was grateful that her mom was no longer suffering but saddened that she would never see her daughter compete. Foxx threw herself into the training. She placed fifth at her first show and third at the next one.

But then at the Team Universe competition in New Jersey, when the NPC official took her aside after the show, he introduced her to the reality you don’t find in the federation’s rule book: Steroids were not optional. The way Foxx understood it, they were required.

She thought about the judges that just watched her on the stage. How much did their objective judgments matter, if they had other orders? The official, whose name she doesn’t remember, was waiting for an answer.

Her mother’s suffering was still fresh. When Foxx was nursing her through the cancer, Janice was given diuretics and steroids. She had seen how they could ravage a body. She also thought about her binge eating, her bulimia, drug abuse and all the terrible things that had been done to her own body.

She had started fitness and bodybuilding to save herself from that. Why would she now go on drugs? The official, after all, thought she was already taking them.

“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t do that,” she told him.

She would go back to the organizations that banned steroid use.

Chapter 7

The following year, Foxx was back at an NPC show, but this time as a coach. It was the 2015 Phil Heath Classic in Houston where Galihadd was also competing.

Foxx had two athletes posing for judges. Though she had walked away from the NPC, some of the women she trained wanted to be on the bigger stages, and Foxx was not going to stand in the way. She warned them about the drugs.

Foxx was an all-purpose coach. She had trained the two women, coached them through their posing, helped them choose bikinis and sprayed on their tans. She didn’t think her job ended when the event started.

During contests, officials known as expediters stage-manage the athletes. They call them by number, tell them when to go on and how to line up.

For some reason, during the call-outs, in which all the athletes were supposed to go out, the numbers for the two women she was coaching were not getting called. She sneaked up behind an expediter and looked over his shoulder. Her athletes had dashes next to their names. She concluded that someone had blacklisted them.

“Why aren’t you calling out these numbers?” she asked.

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“You do know what I’m talking about.”

She pushed her athletes onto the stage.

In the middle of the day-long competition, organizers cleared everyone out to clean during intermission. As Foxx waited outside, a security guard approached her and said that trainers were being let back in. She walked into an empty hallway. Someone grabbed her and pulled her into the event hall in front of the stage.

As it happened, Galihadd had just returned there after the break and noticed a commotion. NPC officials were yelling at a woman carrying a backpack.

People were shouting. One of the men was cursing at her. It shocked Galihadd.

Foxx was threatening to call the police. And then she was escorted out. Amid all the shouting and chaos, Galihadd thought he recognized her.

“Isn’t that the dancer from the Palace?” he thought to himself. “She’s a bodybuilder?”

The next day she posted a message on Facebook marked “feeling ferocious.”

“Yesterday was the greatest experience I have had in my life!” she wrote. “An example was made of me by a group of people who are used to intimidation and manipulation.”

The bullying would only spur her on, she said.

“To know that little old me, the poor fatherless barrio girl from the Paloma has become such a threat to many puts a smile on my face!” she wrote. “All you did was create a bigger monster to deal with!”

Chapter 8

Galihadd might get a kidney transplant, if he was lucky, but the wait list was around five years. He signed up right away. They told him to answer his phone whenever it rang, day or night.

It was hard to let go of bodybuilding. Without the steroids or the growth hormone or the diuretics, he didn’t have the strength or the stamina to work out. His testosterone level crashed. That was a common symptom of steroid abuse: the testicles shrink because they make less testosterone.

His mother offered to give him one of her kidneys, but she wasn’t a match. He was 37 years old.

Three times a week, early in the morning, he would drive to the clinic. A nurse would use a catheter in the right side of his chest to draw blood. It would be filtered in a dialyzer, which performed the role his failing kidneys could no longer fulfill. Then the blood would be pumped back in.

Eventually, he required more hours of treatment. Doctors also joined an artery and a vein in his arm creating a fistula that helped draw blood more easily. It looks like a tangle of thick tubes under the skin on the biceps he had sculpted into beauty.

He slept through most of the dialysis, but it was still 13½ hours a week out of his life, year after year. People would see him in the chair and ask what had happened. He felt like he had to tell the story hundreds of times. He prayed to God to get him out of that chair.

In April 2022, an out-of-state call appeared on his cellphone. He expected spam, but he’d heeded the advice he’d gotten more than four years earlier when he started dialysis.

“Mr. Galihadd, this is Kidney Transplant from Methodist Hospital in San Antonio. We need to ask you some questions.”

There were a lot of questions, and then deliverance.

“We found a kidney for you.”

Jason Galihadd cried into the phone.

Chapter 9

Set inside an old warehouse, Foxx’s gym, Fit Science, has an industrial feel to it. The ceilings rise more than 20 feet in a spacious 2,200-square-foot gym. On the gym’s Facebook page, before-and-after client photos show her skill: She builds bodybuilders.

Foxx is a certified nutritionist and has researched the psychology of eating disorders. What she learned connected the trauma of her childhood to her bulimia, her overeating and her drug abuse.

She’s angry that so many bodybuilders, from teenage amateurs to top pros, are dying — or, like Galihadd, learning the long-term consequences of steroid abuse.

Bodybuilders, including some of the most prominent in the sport, have died after using extreme measures to get built. In an investigation last year, The Washington Post documented the cases of more than a dozen athletes who died young within weeks of competing — when risk of death is highest. At the time, Manion issued a statement saying: “The health, safety and welfare of all our competitors has, and always will be, of utmost importance to us.”

But Manion has not reined in the sport’s drug culture, and he declined to comment on the pitfalls that Foxx and Galihadd faced in the sport.

At the critical forks in their NPC careers, Foxx and Galihadd chose different paths. But now they’ve both dedicated themselves to the same mission: to help others reach the joy they both found in transforming their bodies, while steering them past the shoals of a dangerous sport.

They coach all kinds of people. Some look for a cure to obesity. Some have major health problems. Some arrive with pictures of bodybuilders, asking how they can look like that.

Even when he was on regular dialysis, Galihadd never stopped training others in the sport that nearly killed him. He has slowly built a stable of clients.

Today, more than a year after his transplant, he’s put on 20 pounds of muscle. His body is cut again. The doctors don’t want to undo the fistula, just in case, but last month they tied it down in a surgical procedure because it had become painfully tight on his growing biceps.

During the long recovery, Galihadd says he wasn’t sure that he’d ever feel the pleasure of “the pump” again, but now it’s back.

“It fills out my shirt and the muscles gorge to burst out,” he says. “That’s a great feeling.”

Foxx believes that fitness and nutrition healed the savage wounds of her childhood.

“Bodybuilding saved my life,” she says. “It made me realize that there was something I could control. I could control myself. I could control my surroundings. I could eat food without feeling like I was fat.”

She now judges natural competitions and runs drug-free contests in Texas for Physique America, a competitor of the NPC.

She sees bodybuilding as the art of making the body beautiful, strong and healthy.

“At its best it’s about the beauty of the body. It’s about showing people they can achieve something they never thought they could.”

Alice Crites contributed to this report.