FLIP FLOP TO THE TOP: How Gymnastics Has Shaped My Life
It started off slow and it nagged at me for years. I could feel it eating away at my skin and I knew that someday I would succumb to its demands. The girls with the tightly pinned back hair wore suits of red, white, and blue. I was glued to the screen as they stood at attention ready to enter the arena. They leapt in the most graceful way and I tried to copy their balletic movements. They tumbled and tucked across an endless floor and I struggled to keep up. They stood on elevated blocks, like pedestals, in front of captivated audiences all around the world and waved. So, it was in this way that as a five year old I realized my one true calling: artistic gymnastics. My mother recognized early on that I was a very active child, perhaps a little too active for her liking. For instance, kids at school would shy away from the jungle gym when the sun beat down on the blacktop during yet another unbearable Las Vegas summer; however, nothing could quench my desire to emulate the Olympic gymnasts I had watched effortlessly perform tricky maneuvers. In fact, I would spend my time mounting the metal bars just so that I could throw myself off of them to
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As if by magic, my mother began working at a local recreation center called Robison Community School in our area. The center provided moderately priced lessons of all kinds for the children in the community. My mother, as an employee, was able to enroll me for free in the recreational gymnastics lessons that the center offered. I took lessons at the center for three years before it closed down due to budget cuts. While the lessons were limited in that they lacked all four competitive apparatuses, I gained more strength and flexibility at the center than any gymnast in a club gym could have obtained through taking weekly lessons for a steeper