Personal Narrative: The Reason You Started

Deep breaths… Okay- you got this. It’s just you and the vault. Nothing else matters. You have done this a million times before. Nick always here to catch me if I fall. Muscle memory takes over. When I am in the right mental state, anything seems possible. Any athlete would agree with me. All sports are half mental. AS I run down the runway, I know why I am a gymnast. Every bounding step I take I run farther and farther from everything happening in my life. Farther and farther from all the distractions. I can only hear my feet pounding into the springboard. Flying off the vault with a power I don’t even know I contain, everything zapped into slow motion. This is what it all comes down to. Every minute of training in the gym. Every wrist and

Growing up with a father in the military, you move around a lot more than you would like to. I was born just east of St. Louis in a city called Shiloh in Illinois. When I was two years old my dad got the assignment to move to Hawaii. We spent seven great years in Hawaii, we had one of the greatest churches I have ever been to name New Hope. New Hope was a lot like Olivet's atmosphere, the people were always friendly and there always something to keep someone busy. I used to dance at church, I did hip-hop and interpretive dance, but you could never tell that from the way I look now.

Crash, I had split the beam . I was not ready for this. The nerves got to the best of me. I had fallen on my head , and gotten a concussion. I was doing my flight series which was a back handspring layout step-out. My hand for my handspring had slipped and my head went straight onto the beam. I was at my first meet of season. Beam has never been my strongest event. Thank god my coach was there she had gotten me up and took me to the gym medics. This was my last event too of the meet so then they said “the best option to figure out if my head is ok is to go to the hospital” they said this to my parents.

Starting over. Those two simple words pretty much sum up where I am at in my life at the moment. I am a 34 year old mother of three. I have never been to college. My husband just recently left me. It has been a whirlwind summer to say the least, but before I get into what brought me back to school, I'll start at the beginning. I was born in FL., and quite literally spent all my time either at the beach or running bare foot on my grandparents farm. I loved every second. Shortly after I turned 8 my mom met my step-dad, and we were quickly headed on our first big adventure, moving to Texas! While I missed my family in FL., I can not tell you enough how happy I was that my mom married my dad. He has been a rock and solid foundation for me my whole

Hi iam Edgardo Flores i was born in casa grande, az not that far away from our state capital,Phoenix, Az.theres nothing better to do in a hot summer than going out with the friends to a lake and have a blast riding jet skis boats and my favorite, swimming!My activites of the day are shooting,riding horses,and my favorite one is quad riding.Thats right! ive been doing these fun exciting hobbies since i was 9 years old.pretty young huh?

The accident happened just hours before the first softball tryout of the season. Unfortunately, I knew that this would be an end to my years in softball due to the drastic proportion of the break. Yes, I was bummed, but then I remembered that breaking my arm was a new opportunity to meet people or have new experiences. As I laid in the hospital listening to how my 2 surgeries were going to work out I whispered to myself repeatedly, “remember this is a new, helpful experience.” That was exactly what it was, too. My time through the hospital was full of influential people that to this day I continue to think about what they taught me. For example, one special nurse taught me that breaking my arm wasn’t a lost opportunity, but only a set back and once my arm healed I’d be stronger and better than ever. Though I never returned to the softball field I still remember from time to time that again, when bad situations happen, it is not the end of the world, it’s only a setback to push you into something

limping very noticeably at one point, and I ended each practice with a nauseating feeling.

The next day it was a trip to the doctor and the X ray machine. I am thankful, it wasn’t broken as I feared. The bad news was that the ligaments were damaged. The news wasn’t what I wanted to hear but the

Furthermore, me and my coaches main concern were figuring out whether I would have to quit gymnastics or if

“Get set,” I raised my hips and kept my weight forward, leaning on my hands. The gun cracked, and I did what I did best. I sprinted. About 35 meters in, I felt my weight going too far forward, and I stumbled the last few steps. I knew it was not my best race, and I was disappointed in myself for it. My personal record was 8.01 seconds, and my stomach flipped as I saw “Bruce...8.06” appear on the big screen at Reggie. I went to get water, and congratulated Caroline, since she got a record of 8.01 seconds in her race. Abby saw I was frustrated and tried to comfort me.

I jump back to throw my back handspring. Just as soon as my hands touch the mat, I hear my right wrist make a loud pop. i sit down and start crying. Approximately five minutes later, after i had taken some tylenol, I got up and started doing more back handsprings. I didn’t want anyone to know that I was hurt, so i had to fight through the pain and keep going. As practice goes on it starts hurting worse. When i got home I told my dad that I hurt my arm at cheer practice. Well as any dad would say, my dad said, “Is your bone sticking out of your body? Are you bleeding? I didn't think so. Therefore, you’re alright.” I go to my room and laid down in the bed and started crying from the pain, or maybe it was the words that my dad had said to me, or possibly even both. Eventually, I stopped crying and went to

I was warming up, nervous to compete. My coach had put me up to go first on floor. However, the judges switched the order of the way we were supposed to compete by accident. My teammate had actually gone before me, and I ended up going after. As it was my turn to compete I saluted the judge and stepped onto the floor. I started my routine, and it was going just as it was supposed to. About halfway through my routine, I jumped up and I heard a very loud pop come from my leg. It sounded almost like a plastic bag kids used to pop in middle school when they were filled with air. I came down from my skill funny, and I didn’t actually feel any pain until the end of my routine. My coach had said it was most likely due to adrenaline. All I knew that when I walked of that

It's about December and the meet went well,everything was great, I placed a couple of times and I thought that I did well. It was on vault when I got a video of my second vault and watched it over after the meet. I noticed my hands were almost off the table. I was assuming this was from my back,connecting to my shoulders, leading to my shoulders not stretching far enough. So I asked my coach about it and she said that my vaults were looking kinda funky lately and that my bridges are getting worse. Something must've been up because my bridges are usually good and my shoulders could stretch far back. Currently, my back wasn't in pain, but I'm worried about what's to come next.

One event is not taking the right precautions before going into big leg workouts like I was always doing. To do what I was doing in the gym, a person would need to regularly warm up properly and stretch to avoid big injuries. I would have needed a better all-around setup going into this squat to make it better. Another condition is that I often feel the need to test my strength which in my area of body building, it is not beneficial to lift a lot of weight. For other problems that could have been present during the occurrence of the central problem, I feel as though I was not in the right state of mind to be testing my strength like I was. Far too often people forget how much being in the gym is just as much mental as it is

I continued to dance through the pain the best I could as I had eight hours of dance each day and I didn’t want to disappoint anyone. At night, I would come home and cry, my back hurt so bad. On October 5th, I went to the doctor. I took an x-ray and found out I had a possible stress fracture in my lower back. The doctor said that I could not dance until I got my MRI to be sure. On Friday, October 13th, I should have known it meant bad luck, but I was being optimistic, the MRI showed that I broke my lowest vertebrae. My doctor told me I would not be able to dance for five months. I felt like I was