My Gymnastics Origin Story
This past weekend I watched the NCAA gymnastics national championship and it got me thinking about my own gymnastics story. I still remember getting my first kip on bars. It felt like the biggest deal. And then suddenly there was just so much more to learn. That was kind of the whole thing with gymnastics for me. There was always a next skill, always something to work toward.
I started when I was six and it pretty much took over from there. I loved the team aspect of it, cheering each other on, building each other up. When I was young I used to watch the older team girls and completely look up to them. At home I had posters of the 2003 world championship teams all over my wall. I was obsessed.When I moved up to optional gymnastics it felt like a whole new world. You got to design your own routines, choose your own floor music, learn skills that actually felt like yours. I loved that part of it, the creativity of it, the ownership.
High school is when things got more serious. My gym wasn’t the most competitive, but I put a lot of pressure on myself. I worked my way up to level 9, which came with more hours, harder skills, and a body that started to have opinions about all of it. Torn quad one year, forearm splints the next. About one injury a year, looking back on it.
Me competing at gymnastics competition in California, sometime between 2006 and 2008.
Senior year I hurt my back. Stress fracture and herniated disc, though I didn’t know the full extent of it yet. I just knew it hurt, and I wasn’t ready to stop. I had PT twice a week, practice six days a week, and I was coaching preschool and team gymnastics on top of it. I scaled back to competing only beam and bars for most of the season to manage it, doing all four events at just one meet so I could get a qualifying score for states. It worked. I made it to regionals, and then somehow, against everything, I qualified for Western Nationals. Dead last in my age group. My coach was scanning the score sheet looking for my name and couldn’t find it because he was only looking below the qualifying line. I competed at Western Nationals and had the meet of my life on two events and completely fell apart on the other two. Hit beam, placed third. Hit vault, did the best vault of my career, a piked Yurchenko I’m still proud of. Then bars and floor just went sideways. That’s gymnastics. I left proud anyway.
I went to college thinking I’d walk onto the team. I was still convinced my back would come around. Freshman year I competed club gymnastics trying to get there, but my back had other ideas. It got to the point where I could barely walk to class. I broke down in my freshman writing teacher’s office one day and she referred me to her back doctor. That’s when I finally got an MRI. Stress fracture and a herniated disc... I accepted it pretty quickly after that. My body had been trying to tell me for a long time.
Photography came into my life later, through a different path. Even though I can’t compete anymore, I found a gym as an adult that feels like home. It fills my life in a similar way gymnastics always did. That gym is actually where I first started doing athletic photography and where I realized I loved it. Now I shoot sports, and gymnastics is the one I’m working my way back to. I can’t wait.
