Swolemates: RIMAC Wedding Day Harkens Back to ‘Where It All Started’

Alumni Couple Makes UC San Diego a Big Part of Their Big Day

By Shawn Cyr
Assistant Marketing Director

Her light pink Converse stepped purposefully to the bar. Sydney Wilson wore ruffled, white socks that peeked out of the top of her sneakers as she bent over and wrapped her fingers around the barbell.

The Converse aren’t Sydney’s usual lifting shoes, but on this day, they matched her dress, which featured a subtle floral print. But her smile — a equal-parts mix of happiness and nostalgia — wasn’t because she just hit a new personal record. Rather, it had more to do with the man standing next to her, wearing a classic black tuxedo and shiny black dress shoes.

“We wanted our wedding day to really encompass things we love and to be very connected to who we are,” Sydney says.

That’s right. Just hours before they were set to be legally bound on that mid-March afternoon at the Santee Recorder’s Office in front of family and friends, UC San Diego alumni Paul (’20) and Sydney Wilson (formerly Sydney Larson, ’21) stopped by campus to take some wedding-day photos at two places that hold special meaning to them: Geisel Library and RIMAC.

With an understandably tight schedule, the happy couple had just enough time to hit a few of their favorite lifts (deadlift and bench press), both in their matrimonial attire. They had wide grips and even wider smiles, though Paul did need to brace and focus a bit to hit his 225-pound bench press.

“The mental image of Sydney being in her wedding dress while bench pressing was just hilarious to me, and I knew actually having that would be extremely memorable,” Paul says. “Because we bonded a lot at RIMAC, we wanted to do the photo shoot there.”

Having originally met when they were playing in the UC San Diego Pep Band — Paul played the piccolo, Sydney the clarinet, and, later, tenor sax — during the band’s annual painting of the Revelle anchor tradition, the couple bonded on the long walk home to Sixth College. Sydney remembers them both complaining about their math classes. That started a tradition of walks (and workouts) together.

“I was doing Recreation Gymnastics classes as my exercise of choice at the start of my time at UCSD,” Sydney says. “After we started dating, Paul wanted to introduce me to weightlifting. I never pictured myself as a weightlifting person. He taught me how to do a lot of the lifts, and it became a way we got to spend time together on an activity that was just for us instead of band or school.”

The newlyweds now reside in Seattle, where Paul works as a software engineer at Google and Sydney is an electrical engineer at Kenworth Truck Company. They’ve spent time traveling and backpacking through Europe together. At home, they enjoy video and board games.

And they still work out, just not often together. Both have their own personal trainer, as Paul works out at the office and Sydney at a local gym. Paul has competed in the annual Google office powerlifting competition — he’s captured second place for Seattle in back-to-back years — and boasts PRs of 470 pounds in the squat, 275 on the bench, and 535 in the deadlift.

“There's just something about picking up 500-plus pounds that activates my lizard brain,” he says. “My least favorite exercise is pull-ups. I hate those with a burning passion.

Conversely, Sydney’s not as big a fan of the deadlift, “but that’s mostly because I hate setting it up for myself.” She’s not sure what her favorite lift actually is, but noted that she did “just get a PR of 110 pounds on the bench!”

So while the weight might have been (relatively) light that day in March when cameras clicked, and Paul looked on adoringly, those reps in her pristine wedding dress and light pink Converse will be ones the couple will cherish forever.

"UCSD is where we met, so it was going to be incorporated no matter what,” she says. “As for RIMAC, the gym has become a big part of both of our lives, and RIMAC is where it all started.”