Long before she bench-pressed her first barbell, Shanelle Chong-Galario learned what it means to bear the weight.

The 18-year-old Waialua High School graduate, who was born with club feet and no legs, attracts attention in large part because of the unusual figure she cuts in the gym. With her torso strapped to the bench, the 103-pound Chong-Galario can bench-press an impressive 150 pounds.

And while she is often bemused at the reactions she gets from strangers, she refuses to be swayed by the opinions of people who know nothing about where she's been and what she's experienced.

"I've experienced plenty," Chong-Galario says. "As a child, I got teased a lot, but I always had people around me who told me to keep my head up and not listen to what other people say. Going through all of that just made me stronger and more confident."

But if the schoolyard barbs registered only superficial wounds, the upheaval and loss Chong-Galario experienced as an adolescent cut far deeper.

Shortly after Chong-Galario was born, her mother, Naomi Chong, gave her infant daughter to her best friend, Joy Luke, to raise. The prognosis wasn't good: Doctors warned Luke and her husband, Julian, that Chong-Galario would not be able to walk, hear or speak.

But the doctors underestimated both Chong-Galario's abilities and the Lukes' capacity for nurturing. By the time Chong asked for her daughter back, Chong-Galario had shown that she was a normal little girl from the waist up.

Chong-Galario and her birth mother were especially close, Julian Luke says. And that made it especially crushing when Chong passed away from complications of diabetes in 2001. (Chong-Galario had all of her toes amputated that same year.)

Chong-Galario's father was already struggling with drug addiction, and shortly after his wife's death, he returned Chong-Galario to the Lukes' care.

"Shanelle and her mom did everything together, but she's also very independent," Luke says. "She can do whatever she sets her mind to."

Just as natural parents would, the Lukes encouraged Chong-Galario to explore her interests and, when necessary, to work around her disability to achieve whatever she envisioned.

"My parents have always been supportive of my dreams and my future," says Chong-Galario, an able swimmer, wrestler and volleyball player.

Shortly before the start of her senior year, Chong-Galario made up her mind to give weightlifting a try "just to see what it felt like and what it was like to train."

She enrolled in a weightlifting class and, under the tutelage of instructor Lyle Lavarias, became a regular in the school gym.

It wasn't easy.

"At first I couldn't even lift the 45-pound bar," Chong-Galario says, laughing. "I was in pain after the first class, but it was worth it. If I hadn't taken that class, I'd never be where I am now."

Chong-Galario kept at it, her strength and endurance steadily increasing as she trained two to three times a week. And as she added plate after heavy plate to her barbells, Chong-Galario became aware of another sort of growth.

"I got a lot more confidence," she says. "Something changed, in myself and in other people who see me."

Chong-Galario's blossoming was one of the last things Joy Luke would witness. Last November, six years after Naomi Chong passed away, Chong-Galario lost her second mother to heart disease.

"It was really hard," Chong-Galario says. "It's still really hard. At the same time, it was hard seeing her and my mom suffer over the years. I know they're both in a better place now."

Still in mourning, Chong-Galario returned to the weight room, to the surety of sweat-blackened iron and the rise-or-fail ethic.

Chong-Galario concentrates her efforts on the bench press, military press, incline press and lat pull-down. At the fifth annual Bench Press Your Body Weight Championships last month, she impressed her fellow competitors by bench-pressing 150 pounds, some 45 pounds more than her body weight at the time.

"She's a tough kid," says Julian Luke, who has six other grown children. "I never told her — and nobody has ever told her — that she can't do something. Whatever she wants to do, she should at least try it."

And there is much to sample. Chong-Galario says she can't wait to try her hand at basketball, wheelchair racing, even skiing.

When she's not volunteering at the Wahiawa Public Library, Chong-Galario plans on spending as much time as she can hanging out with friends, going to the beach and finding new sports to master. In the fall, she'll enter Leeward Community College with plans to pursue an education in international sign language.

"I try not to think of the negative things I've been through because they just bring me down," Chong-Galario says. "There are a lot of things that I still want to do and I feel like I can because of all the support I've had over the years."

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.