Gymnastics

When I was very young my mother put me in gymnastics classes. Whether she did it to further her goal of having a physically fit daughter with unique experiences and excellent time management skills or just to stop me from jumping around the apartment all the time, I do not know, but I have my assumptions.

It would be ridiculous of me to characterize gymnastics, the sport, as evil. Sports cannot be evil. Sports are not even tangible things – just arbitrary rules for people in silly costumes using special equipment. My first gymnastics coach, however, was pure evil. Her name was Jillian and in classic early-90s New Jersey style she had a perm and two-inch-long acrylic nails. If you are asking yourself how it was possible for a woman with two-inch-long fake nails to coach gymnastics, don't worry: she didn't. The gym was owned by an older couple who escaped some awful Eastern European country for the American dream of moving to central Jersey and opening a business doing exactly what they'd done at home, only with more Italians.

Jillian was the owners' daughter. She may or may not ever have done gymnastics herself, but she was very good at yelling at other people about it. She wore very unflattering spandex shorts and XXL t-shirts with stupid slogans on them and a neon scrunchy around her wrist at all times, in case one of the eight-year-olds she was in charge of got out of line and she needed to hold her perm back (she was also willing to use the nails as weapons). She had a small army of assistant coaches, including Scott, the only one whose name I can remember because I had a giant eight-year-old crush on him, and an assortment of angry Russians who would point to body parts and scream “No! Bad!” until you figured out what you were doing wrong and fixed it.

I have the pain tolerance of a woman with seven naturally delivered children. When I was in college I sought medical help for some serious knee pain I was experiencing while running, and the doctor came back with two pieces of surprising news: first, my knee was broken; second, I broke it ten years previously and never noticed. And it hurt to run because instead of pulling on my kneecap as they were designed to do, my ligaments were pulling on shards of the kneecap I once had. He suggested we take a few more X-rays and that I seek serious physical therapy. Further visits revealed that I had actually broken both knees and both ankles at some point in my life and that my shins are thick and hard like a Mai Thai fighter who kicks trees to increase his bone mass, except I did none of that on purpose and I was probably twelve at the time.

So I went back to gymnastics.

Most of my childhood gymnastics memories are terrible: the time I dismounted the high bar and landed with completely straight legs and the coaches refused to let me go home despite the fact that my knees were swelling and turning purple before their eyes. As I discovered years later, they were both broken, but I got one day off practice to rest and then went back because winners don't let a little thing like multiple broken bones get in their way. The time I slipped on beam and fell, like a pendulum, head-first into the metal support bars while simultaneously managing to scrape the inside of my thigh so bad it looked like I had a very unfortunate fall from a motorcycle at 65mph on the freeway. The time Jillian pushed me off the beam, while I was upside down, because she thought was I was doing was ugly.

But I absolutely love gymnastics. I used to sleep in splits to improve my flexibility. I used to do ab workouts while I watched television because I didn't want any second to go to waste: I wanted the trophy at States. As an adult I love the sport with a much less insane and much more selfish motive: it is super cool to flip around, and most people can't do it.

Almost anyone can do a cartwheel or a handstand against the wall. The people I've met who don't know, I've taught. But most people can't run full speed, flip onto their hands, and then rotate backwards in the air before landing on their feet. The sport that once tormented me with delusions of impossible grandeur ("If you drop out of school and get a private tutor and increase your training from 25 hours per week to 40, maybe in three years you'll be ready for the Olympics, if the thousands of other girls who are making the same decision right now don't beat you out for the handful of spots on the National Team. Go for it!") gives me pride. My back is ripped in a weird Lady-Hulk way that once upset me but now makes wearing a tank top a no-brainer. None of the coaches at my new gym insinuate that getting your period means you aren't training hard enough - in fact, they don't talk about my period at all. I show up to a gym full of coaches with positive who just want to help me get my $15, 90-minutes worth, and when I'm nice to them they're nice back!

I look forward to going, because every day I get to re-learn something I used to be able to do. Gymnastics is kind of like riding a bike, in that your muscles always remember how to do it, but kind of not, in that your muscles also remember that you took ten years off and you smoke now and you haven't done abs in front of the TV since that time you got drunk at a party and had a competition with some frat boy over how many sit-ups you could do... and lost. So I get the fun of re-learning with the physical pain and mental pleasure of knowing I'm actively improving my body. And when I do something right, these coaches tell me.

They point to the body part they were trying to correct and shout "Good! Yes!"