Tough Terry Lopez : Police: The LAPD officer follows a grueling fitness regimen to win “toughest cop” contests. She works in a ghetto and grew up in one.

At 3 a.m., while most people are still asleep, Terry Lopez wakes up to head to the Los Angeles Police Academy gym for the start a four-hour workout that includes bench-pressing 160 pounds, running five to seven miles and swimming a mile.

All this before she begins her day at the South Bureau office of the Police Department’s Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) unit, above the Big B Ranch market in Watts.

That’s because Lopez, 32, 5-feet, 7-inches tall and 135 pounds, is the Toughest Cop Alive--three-time women’s division winner of the World’s Toughest Cop title.

She is on a mission to regain the title of California’s Toughest Cop, which she lost in 1988 to CHP Sgt. Jill Angel. She retained her world title, however, beating Angel at the World Police and Fire Games last year in Vancouver, Canada.

As a guest competitor in a national competition in Washington today and Saturday she will be tuning up for the Los Angeles Police Department’s toughest cop contest, to be held in August, and the state contest in September.

The LAPD’s Toughest Cop Alive competition, which has eight events including a three-mile run, a 100-meter dash, a 100-meter freestyle swim, shot put and bench press, was started in 1981 and is held every other year. Women began competing in 1983. The world Toughest Cop Alive competition is held in alternating years.

Training for the competition has helped Lopez in her field work as a police officer, said Sgt. Richard Roupoli, head of the South Bureau CRASH unit.

“She’s an outstanding police officer,” Roupoli said. “She’s a very high-energy type person anyway. Her training enhances her performance.”

The competition is similar to some police activities, and Lopez uses that fact as motivation. “When I’m competing in the obstacle course, I’m chasing a suspect; when I’m swimming, I’m saving a drowning baby; when I’m running, I’m in a foot pursuit, and when I’m doing the rope climb, I imagine the ground is like fire,” she says.

Working for the CRASH unit in one of the roughest Los Angeles neighborhoods is second nature to Lopez, who was raised in a barrio in Pico Rivera. Gangs were part of her life as a child.

“You learned to fight, you learned to survive,” said Lopez, who helped her mother take care of the family, making certain her three brothers stayed out of gangs and graduated from high school.

Lopez graduated from Cal State San Francisco with a speech and communications degree.

She almost did not become a police officer. She was asked to resign while training in the academy in 1982 because she was out of shape and couldn’t keep up with the rest of the recruits. “I couldn’t do one push-up, not even one pull-up,” she said.

That’s when she started working out. The former El Rancho High School athlete came into the academy at 155 pounds and, six months later, graduated 28 pounds lighter.

“I was a Size 14 and went down to a Size 6,” she said.