Growing up on a farm in small-town Saskatchewan exposed Dawn Straf to a range of responsibilities and hobbies.
That influence was clear as she grew up to be a Jane-of-all-trades. She has been a mechanic, a welder, a nurse and now an orthopedic massage therapist, carpenter, body sculptor and hunter – to name a few.
Now a Flin Flon resident, Straf grew up on a farm in Leask, Saskatchewan, with an older brother and a younger sister. There was plenty of manual labour to go around.
She learned early on to fix things around both the house and the farm, be it a leaky roof or a broken tractor.
Straf spent her days pitching hay bails, shoveling grain and helping wherever needed.
“It’ just normal to me to do that,” she says. “I don’t know any different. You just had to do what you had to do.”
As a young woman, Straf worked as a mechanic and welder on the oil field, helping to keep the family farm afloat.
After a few years in western Canada, she moved to the US to take nursing with her son in tow.
“I needed a career and I thought, ‘Well, my mom was a nurse, maybe I should be a nurse.”
Having first followed in the footsteps of her father, then her mother, Straf admits she didn’t know what she wanted to do.
“[I was] in my 20s, I [didn’t] know what I [wanted] to be when I [grew] up,” she says. “I’m 43 and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.”
Straf says it took time to figure out what she wanted out of life.
“I thought I needed to be something specific and I think once I started figuring out who I was…it’s just a nice balance. It just worked.”
A mom who never married, Straf made sure her son was exposed to traditionally male-dominated aspects of life.
“He didn’t know any different,” Straf says of her son, now 23. “He was three years old on his first hunting trip with me. He just thought it was pretty cool to hold the horns.”
Hunting isn’t a big of a part of Straf’s life as it once was, but it’s still important.
“I’ve got a couple pretty horns on my wall, but it’s to say it was a part of my life. It’s just one of those pages you turn,” she says, as two sets of antlers hang in her dining room.
Straf now focuses her energy on rebuilding her home, enjoying the outdoors and competing in body-sculpting competitions.
Experience on the farm, instruction from her uncle, textbooks, YouTube and much trial and error have helped her reconstruct the inside of her Boam Street home and business.
She has spent the past two years redoing the 1938 structure from the three-suite complex she bought to the home and personal gym it is now.
“I’ve been going like a lunatic…under construction since I bought it,” Straf laughs, standing in her redesigned kitchen.
She has remodeled everything from the flooring and cupboards to the ceilings and stairs, among other features.
When she’s not working or working on her home, Straf stays in tip-top shape by working out in her home gym.
She has competed in body sculpting competitions for about 15 years and continues to do so.
Straf says she can practically be ready for a competition at the drop of a hat.
“It’s a lifestyle so I pretty much look the same all year-round. I don’t do the starvation thing. It’s all about longevity. I have a career and if I don’t take care of myself, I can’t take care of anyone else. I practice what I preach.”
Many might expect body sculptors to cut down their food intake before a competition, but for Straf it’s the opposite.
“If anything, I increase my food intake. I don’t change my workouts – maybe I’ll bike an extra 20 minutes twice a week.”
With her physically demanding job and hobbies, Straf says on an average day she consumes about 2,500 or 3,000 calories. When she’s preparing for a competition, she increases that to about 8,000 calories.
“And most of it’s fat. I eat coconut oil from the jar. I try to go for wings every Thursday and I like my cheesecake. I’m going to have my cake and eat it, too.
“I’ve met a lot of people who do it and it’s not a lifestyle, it’s a bucket list. I’m not into that.”
Straf says in the 15 years she’s been competing, she has noticed that women rarely stick with the sport.
“I go and meet these young girls that are doing it, but you only see them once. There are very few of us who you’ll see throughout the years.”
Straf started competing in the US, where competitors were taught to be feminine in their poses – the opposite for across the border.
“In Canada they were looking for a brute. I happened to be German and I’m the body type that can just pull it off.”
Once she was back in Canada after living in the US, Straf competed in competitions across the country, mostly in the western provinces.
The competitions were changing with the format shifting from the massive muscles of bodybuilding to the more toned look of body sculpting.
“They don’t want women looking like that,” says Straf. “It’s not feminine.
“That angered me. I thought, ‘Why can’t you do both?”
Straf took the changing format as a personal challenge and in 2005 entered a bodybuilding competition and a figure competition at the same time in Saskatchewan.
“I was the first one to compete in both figure and bodybuilding. I literally would run backstage, change and run back on stage.”
Straf took home a first-place title in bodybuilding and a second-place in figure.
“It’s a challenge. It’s how you pose yourself. If you do a bodybuilding pose, you’re going to look like a bodybuilder. If you do a figure pose, you’re going to look feminine.”
Straf is the only female in Saskatchewan to have ranked in the two separate events in the same day.
Body sculpting competitions continue to interest Straf, as she laughs and says she’ll be 80 years old in a bikini on stage.
She is looking forward to a break after the construction of her house is complete, but don’t expect Straf to slow down for long. That just wouldn’t be in her nature.
