You’re sweating, with blood on your hands, and chalk all over your body.
You’ve spent an hour on the uneven bars with 30 minutes to go until your next event. The coaches are screaming, tears are running down your face, and all you want to do is go home, shower, and lay in bed until you have to do it all over again.
Gymnastics is a full-time job. It’s a huge commitment. You’re expected to show up and give 150 percent every single day. If you’re sick, you show up anyway. If you’re injured, you show up and condition. There’s no good excuse to miss practice. There are no days off.
Even when there’s no practice, you’re still expected to stretch and condition on your own. The teammates that do put in the work will pull ahead of everyone else.
You deal with soreness, injuries, cramps, and muscle spasms every day of your life. No matter how many ice baths, agonizing deep-tissue massages, Icy Hot patches, or Ibuprofen you use or take, your body will never feel “good” or “normal.”
To keep up with even the most basic principles, you need to have crazy strength and flexibility to accomplish these elements safely. It takes insane grip strength – to the point where your forearms start cramping and feel separated from your arms – to get through a bar routine. You have to deal with rips, which are layers of skin on your palms sheared off from holding the bars so tight, some the size of quarters on your hands that never heal.
You need excellent cardio to complete a single vault or floor routine, and serious balance to not just stay on the beam, but to do all the skills that come with competing. With the pressure of the judges and peers watching, competing on the balance beam can feel like walking a tightrope with no net to catch you.
You have to work your butt off just to be an average gymnast, so what does that say about the best in the world? Half of the time, by about age 13 or 14, girls start to make the decision whether to stick with it, or to have their life back again.
For the most part, girls decide the commitment and pain isn’t worth it anymore. They get burnt out and fall out of love with what once filled their life.
Doing gymnastics since I was 3 years old, these concepts have always been second nature, my “normal.” Putting in less than 100 percent means getting scratched from the roster.
That fear has spread to all aspects of my life. I can’t make progress in life sitting around, procrastinating, feeling sloppy and lazy. I was able to learn from the mistakes I made and find a way to lift myself up after being squashed down.
I learned this two years ago when I broke my foot doing a switch-leap, which resembles a scissor-kick launching four feet in the air; something I’ve done for years, something so simple.
The fracture put me out for the rest of the season. During the three weeks I stayed at home, my drive and work ethic deteriorated. The 25 hours of practice each week turned into a lifeless month of scrolling through TikTok and watching sit-coms like Friends. Having watched these shows a million times, it was just background noise. So, why did I bother turning them on? A feeling of comfort? Familiarity?
The applause and excitement that once filled my life from competing began to feel like that same background noise.
After I healed, getting back into my old schedule felt forced. My coach needed my balance beam score at a state competition, so I rushed to get my routine cleaned up by completing beam routines, one after the other, until they were “perfect” and ready to compete. I hadn’t had enough time to prepare and dropped to the floor below the beam. I knew we lost the competition as soon as my feet hit the mat. My coach refused to make eye contact with me, and when she looked in my direction, it was a blank stare that felt like pure hatred. I saw the fire in her eyes filled with disappointment and fury. She told me, “Good job” like it was forced, like it was out of pity.
Living a life being a part of the background noise made me realize how much harder it was to get noticed. To be a part of the excitement again I needed to relearn the struggle of failure; and with that comes learning how to turn failures into successes.
I didn’t realize how hard it would be to bounce back. I thought I could recover without practice; I thought I was mentally strong enough. But that strength comes from daily successes and consistency.
When the ability to do gymnastics was taken from me, I didn’t know what to do with myself. The injury ripped away my sense of purpose. But while I wallowed, I realized I was more than just a gymnast. I was more than what a sport could ever give me. Did gymnastics force me to develop discipline to be the best and not make excuses? Yes. But I chose to make that a part of me, to embrace it.
The way someone reacts to failure shows who they really are. No one should give up when they experience one minor setback. Instead, this should motivate them to get back up and try even harder. If the drive to be better doesn’t overpower any hardships they experience, maybe they haven’t found the right motivation.
So, whether it’s another sport, club, or job, find your passion and remember to put your all into it, especially when your perseverance to keep going comes into question.