Loving and Losing Adult Gymnastics

I’ve loved gymnastics as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, I took classes at a local place, I coached  little kids in my early 20s, and then did adult gymnastics at the gym near my house. I loved the adrenaline rush, the precision of trying to get it right. I got to where I could do a front layout half out on a trampoline. Unfortunately one day I went for yet other front tuck on the trampoline, fell, and heard a crack; to make a long story short I needed a plate and screws in that ankle and eventually two surgeries, one failed and one successful, to reconstruct my right ankle.


I have been a fat person since elementary school and as an adult I’ve had many health problems, especially metabolic ones, plus liver disease; there was a health scare a couple years ago that led to my getting heavily into working out. Suddenly I went to the gym multiple times a week. After maybe six months of this it occurred to me that maybe I could try adult gymnastics again, now that I was in better shape than I had been (though, at 39, and already diagnosed with arthritis in both knees, a torn meniscus in one, and a terrible right ankle, I certainly wasn’t in GOOD shape). So I signed up at a gym near me.


Those first few classes kicked my ass—i had to take NSAIDs just to fall asleep-but god, I loved it again right away. I started with one class  a week and moved quickly into coming twice a week. And for the past year plus, I did my three hours of gymnastics a week, supplementing with other workouts. I decided I wanted to compete, something I’ve always wanted to do and was never able to, and even took some private lessons.


Here’s the thing: I loved it so much. I loved the control over my body it gave me. I loved the feeling of weightlessness in an (attempted) front tuck. I loved the power I could feel in my arms as I vaulted or even did a handstand. I loved the social aspect, the friends I made along the way, and especially the way we cheered each other on. One of my fondest memories is doing something- literally I don’t remember what- and hearing my first coach yell “fuck yeah, V!” I loved the problem solving we did together. I was usually the worst one in my classes at most things, though thankfully not everything, but I didn’t even really care. Everyone was kind, everyone was supportive, we talked together about how to get skills done, how to make the right shapes with our bodies. We complained about being scared. We congratulated each other on being brave. The coaches, all four that I had, were fantastic, and supportive, and never once made me feel weird about being fat, old, injured, the worst at so many things. If they thought it was a bit foolish of me to keep doing gymnastics despite the being constantly hurt, well, they never let it show. 


Here is the other thing: I hurt, a lot. It started with my elbows. Handstands and cartwheels would be sometimes unbearably painful. Sometimes I could barely lift something with my arms. I did bracing and PT and cortisone shots. My hamstring has bothered me almost since the beginning, waxing and waning in severity, but consistently hurting ands sometimes making sitting quite painful.


I didn’t care, or else I convinced myself I didn’t care, which is more or less the same thing in the end. I have always had a sense of recklessness about my physical body, and I could feel it especially in gymnastics class, the way I would fling my body into space without knowing what would happen next. It hurt, a lot of the time.


I loved it so much., with a kind of free, incandescent joy that i do not normally get to feel.


You will note I have said all this in the past tense. Almost six weeks ago i did a teeter totter on high beam (basically, you put your hands in front of you and then lift your back leg until you’re essentially in a standing side split) and came off the beam, landing half on and half off a mat. Immediate pain, but I could walk. Then swelling, but again, I thought perhaps just a minor injury. I ended up going to the ER in the middle of the night because the pain was so intense and then seeing various orthopedists. It is “just” a sprain, but a bad enough one that I am still in a boot most of the time, and I was completely incapacitated for nearly a week.


In that time, though, I was diagnosed with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that seems to explain virtually everything I’ve been trying to get doctors to address for more than thirty years. The belly pain that sends me to the ED periodically, my non-contracting esophagus, my inability to hold a pencil correctly or sit normally, my bones and joints cracking and sliding, my tendency to scar badly, slow wound healing, my clumsiness, probably some of my neurodivergence, the fatigue, the bad teeth and jaw, probably my low blood pressure and correspondingly high heart rate, the temperature sensitivity….a huge number of things that make sense now. This is good, obviously, in some ways; most notably it means that this whole time, when I’ve gone to doctors begging for an explanation only to be told that my labs are normal….it wasn’t  all in my head. Something was wrong, the entire time. It was never that I was crazy. 


It also explains why I got injured so much in gymnastics and why none of it, despite PT and injections and dry needling and stretching, ever got any better. An explanation is helpful. It always is.


But it does mean I need to give up high impact sports. I can’t risk falling off beam like that again- it’s been well over a month and my ankle is still quite swollen. I can’t risk vaulting, or probably trampolining. I can’t make my existing injuries worse. I can’t assume I will heal like a normal person will, or that I will heal at all. I cannot keep pushing myself as if it will have no consequences. 


I’ve thought a lot, lately, about whether I regret it. Of course in many ways it would have been far better to know, before my fortieth year, that I have this disorder; it would have allowed me to learn to protect my body in a way that it turns out is pretty important. But the things I would have missed. The collapsing in giggles as we tried doing drills in sync. The joy of standing up a vault, of landing a handstand on high beam. The sense of impregnable strength when I stayed in a handstand for a long time, the sense of grace when I remembered to point my toes. The pride when a coach told me I’d done something well, or that it looked pretty, or that it looked better. 


I’ve probably done permanent damage in my gymnastics journey.  And I never did get to compete, and unless it’s a very basic floor routine involving just a few low impact elements I imagine I never will. I threw huge amounts of money and time and resources into the sport, not just going to and paying for class but physical therapy, braces, needling, taping.  My hamstring, knees, elbows, and ankles will probably never be the way they were. 


Would I do it again, make, as Raymond Carver wrote, the same “unforgivable mistakes?”


Gymnastics, even in just a little over a year, gave me a new way to think about myself in middle age, as a strong, competent person who other people liked, as someone who could challenge herself, as someone who could experience the sheer joy and freedom of physicality in a way I had not in at least a decade and a half. It made me unafraid of hard things, it made me trust myself and my body more, it gave me confidence in my ability to fit into groups, it gave me a sense of pride I almost never experience. It helped me learn to tolerate disappointment and limits. It helped me dream. 


So, to continue quoting Carver, would I do it again? “Yes, given half a chance. Yes.”






















 


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