Back Bend Short Story

Then my heart was beating more than 20 miles per hour. I went off to do my last tumbling pass, I did a roundoff back-handspring layout-full. In my head i was saying “C’mon stick it!” Then when I finally hit the floor, my feet gently met one another and the floor, my feet did not move one inch . I did not believe it, I had

At the tender age of five, my family decided to put me into gymnastics, one of the most challenging sports, both physically and mentally. Gymnastics revolves around obtaining perfection—an unreachable goal for anyone, especially a five-year-old. Albert Einstein defines insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Performing the same routine in front of a panel of people who will judge even my smallest flaws fits this definition to a tee. Welcome to the world of competitive gymnastics. What compelled my parents to put me in this sport, I will never know, but I have never regretted their decision.

To my first attempt trying to do a front-handspring and with a thud I had landed on the hard grass.

So I had been working on my round off back handspring for quite a long time. About possibly three years. Though I had gone to several clinics and still I didn’t get my back handspring. Well a lot of people I knew had theirs already which made me feel more upset. I tried a lot of times and I would always have mental blocks and I felt like I didn’t try hard enough sometimes and it really made me terrified when my teammates always looked at me! I sometimes just

At the end of an 8th-grade year, the office called any girls wanting to try out for high school cheer. HIGH SCHOOL CHEER!! The next step of cheer, cheering at the football games, basketball games. I was excited to try out for high school cheerleading. Even cheering with upper classmen! The paper that was given to us had a bunch of words on it, it gave us choices like: “Just Football”, “Just Basketball”, “Football and Basketball”, and another one that said, “Competition, Football, and Basketball”. I thought to myself, “What was the competition cheer like?” No idea, but on the cheerleading Facebook page, there were new coaches. This was going to be their third year as a UHS high school cheer coach. They were also really pretty, and on the

I tumble down the stairs shrieking when I hit each step. The stairs are a spiraled staircase so my head was hitting the metal rails as well. I finally reached the bottom. When I woke up I saw nobody, I couldn’t even see. I started freaking out. Then I felt a little pinching sensation at my calf then suddenly I fell back asleep. I woke up to hear that my wife had a baby.

If I didn’t like it, then I didn’t have to continue. I tied a knot in my rope, and tried my best to hold on. I stood at the bar for months with straight knees, and my back in the straightest line I could manage. I stretched every day. I tried my best in class because I didn’t want them to tell me that I wasn’t good enough. We had extra classes to prepare us, and we had excersizes that we had to do at home. I did them all the time. I could tell I was getting better. I was getting so much stronger. My leg was getting higher every day.Then we received another

Then, as quick as air, he writhed his way out, came out behind me, and scored two points for a reversal. I struggled to get one point for an escape, but we went out-of-bounds. Placed at the center of the mat again, I finally escaped. Sloppily, he took another shot and I scored off of it as I had done before. He quickly escaped, bringing the score to 5-3. Suddenly, he went in for another takedown. Unable to defend properly, I fell to the ground and he scored, tying the score at 5-5. I could hear my teammates and my coaches shouting my name, telling me to escape. I squirmed and finally managed to escape and score the point; I was in the lead. I just had to survive these last few seconds and I would win. We circled around more, but I kept backing away, unwilling to risk giving him any more points. The whistle sounded, “One point red, stalling on green.” The score was 6-6. I cringed slightly, but kept my composure.

Next were the kicks; “”Ahp-Cha-Ki” (front kick), “Tollyo-Cha-Ki” (roundhouse kick), which is my favorite kick, “Yup-Cha-Ki” (sidekick), etc. I was certain I did all my kicks correctly but I was still scared and nervous. I kept thinking to myself, “What if I didn’t kick high enough? What if I turned

I shifted into first gear and took the small rough dirt path. I put both of my feet down. I would have tumbled off the bike it was so rough. There was a big jolt at the end of the path.

I had planned on being a base and trying out as a base. One day Coach Ridenhour, the coach for the VJ cheer squad, asked if anyone wanted to try to be a flyer. I thought it might be fun to try, so I said that I would be interested. She put me in a stunt as a flyer, I was a little nervous because I had never done it before. As I was going up my heart started pounding in my chest, my fists clenched up, so many thoughts were going through my brain all at once. I thought I was going to fall, but before I knew it I was up and stable in the stunt! I could not believe I had got up there and did not fall. We tried it a few more times and each time I hit the stunt.

I looked around to brag about it to my brother. When I looked at him, he had blood gushing out of his nose. My heart started pounding and I ran up to him. I had kicked him in the face when I did my flip. I asked him to not tell on me because I did not want to get in trouble. We tried to think of something to stop the bleeding because I did not want to go inside the house and have to explain what happened. Our aunt and uncle are the parents that would be upset and yell at us for doing dangerous things, which is why I did not want to tell them.

I landed face first. As I collected the pile of papers scattered around me, I cringed and briskly glanced at the unfamiliar faces fixated on my every move below the narrow landing of the school stair case. I briefly questioned whether I was in a cliché high school film before I was brought back to the reality of my freshman year by a stranger who yelled at me to move so she could get to class. As I fumbled back up on my feet and trudged to my sixth period class, my thoughts lingered on the unsurprising nature of this turn of events. Only two weeks earlier I tumbled to the ground in the middle of a half marathon. This clumsiness was not a new development. My evident lack of coordination had loomed over me since childhood, memorialized by the

“It doesn’t matter how many times you get knocked down. It just matters that you get up one more time than you were knocked down.” -(Roy T. Bennett) Never giving up on something can lead you to do bigger things in life and excel you to new goals you have never probably thought about before.

As I got an invitation to go to open gym with my friends, my main thoughts were, “I hope I can get some new skills tonight.” Little did I know, my thoughts about four hours later would be, “I have never been so upset, angry, or disappointed in my life.” As I walked into the cold, noisy gym, I was prepared to achieve my round off back handspring back tuck. I assured myself that I would be able to do it successfully. I wished that the ground was as soft and comforting as the dark trampoline with orange and blue bumpers. Seeing girls doing back walkovers on the thin, beige, four- inch beam, swinging their bodies around the slippery, uneven bars, and flipping themselves into the sky blue, squishy mat made me tell myself, “If they can do that,