12-year-old girl can carry her own weight

CHARLESTON, Ill. -- Amy Miller is a pretty, blonde 12-year-old with a winning smile, immaculate nails and the lifting power of an elevator.

Competing in June at the U.S. Weightlifting Schoolage National Championships in Louisiana, Amy set a national record for girls 16 and under when she hoisted 133 pounds toward heaven. To put that in perspective, the seventh-grader's own body only weighs just over 94 pounds.

Her champion lift was done in the two-hands, clean-and-jerk style, in which competitors heave the weights to chest height before raising them above their heads. Using the snatch -- lifting straight above the head in one fluid movement -- Amy managed more than 93 pounds to set a meet record.

Her combined feats also earned her the trophy for Most Outstanding Lifter and yet, Amy's ego is a lot harder to raise than any dead weight.

"I do this because it's fun and I enjoy it, but I never expected to be this good at it," she says. "People are always telling me I can go on to do this and this and this and I am like 'Yeah, whatever.' For me, it's not real until it actually happens."

One of few iron girls

There's estimated to be only 1,000 iron girls like Amy in the entire country. Her attempts to pump up the numbers by enticing friends to come join her haven't exactly taken off.

"The girls say 'hmm, well, that's your thing' and the boys say I'm weird and make fun of me, saying I have huge legs," says Amy, who stands 4 feet 11 inches tall and has the graceful figure of a dancer.

"I kind of think the boys won't lift because they know I can lift more than them and they feel it would make them look stupid," she says. "Might be humiliating, I suppose."

Amy only got into the sport in January after watching a friend throwing weights around. When weightlifting suddenly gate-crashed the pre-teen scene, her parents were suitably nervous.

"Amy kind of has a charmed life -- she's good at everything she does -- but we had to talk about this," says her mom, Debbie, 40.