For 17 years, I spent my life in a leotard, in a gym, covered in chalk. Some of the best and worst days of my life were spent there. “Blood, sweat, and tears” doesn’t even begin to sum up the sport of gymnastics, because it’s so much more than that. Sure, those are some of the things that come with being any high level athlete, but being a gymnast teaches you so many valuable life lessons. Many gymnasts become involved in the sport before they even begin going to school, so they have the opportunity to build friendships, gain confidence, and learn discipline from a very young age. Gymnasts are a unique breed. There are many things that set us apart from everyone else and, to prove that, here are 18 ways that you know you’re an ex-gymnast.
1. When someone finds out that you used to be a gymnast, the very first thing out of their mouth is, “can you do a flip?” As if you’ve never heard that before…
Sometimes you roll your eyes and look at them like, “are you seriously asking me this question?” Other times, you simply perform one of these so-called “flips” and walk away, perhaps unsure of how you’re still able to do that, but satisfied, nonetheless.
2. You’re constantly in pain.
If you’re like me, you carry a bottle of Tylenol or Ibuprofen with you at all times because you know you’ll more than likely need it at some point during the day. You have nightmares about all of those times you fell on beam and your coach told you to “get back up and do it again” because you were “fine” even though you didn’t even think you could get back up. (You probably thanked them later for it.) You may have even quit the sport because of an injury and, when you tell people this, they suddenly become so concerned. You wonder why at first, but later you realize, oh yeah, it’s not normal for people to get hurt on a regular basis.
3. You get sick of people constantly asking, “How is that even comfortable?” or “How did you even get into that position?”
OK, gymnasts DO sit in some pretty odd positions. But, in our defense, it’s not our fault that we can. Everyone else is just jealous that they’re not as flexible as we are… and oftentimes, you find yourself pointing your toes without even thinking about it. It’s simply second nature to you, and you don’t even notice it until someone points it out or you happen to look down.
4. You almost feel insulted when someone brings up the show “Make It or Break it.”
OK, let’s get one thing straight: as far as the actual gymnastics part goes, that show was a joke. The girls were supposed to be Elite gymnasts, like the ones that go to the Olympics, but they were doing Level 8 skills. Come…on… I mean, really? Have they ever watched a competition? But even with that being said, you definitely watched it and loved every second of it.
5. You have more than a few leotards still lying around somewhere.
You basically lived in these every day; they became a part of who you are. Maybe you don’t have all of your practice leos, but you at least have a couple competition leos, and when you look at them, you reminisce about the glory days… Sometimes you might even put one on, just to remember what it felt like. And you know that you used to live for the days when you would convince your mom to buy you a new one. They were our version of a Coach purse.
6. You hate when people compare gymnastics to other sports, especially cheerleading… *scoff*
When a lot of people think of cheerleading, they think of cheering for a high school team. While school spirit is nothing to be ashamed of, this is typically an insult to us gymnasts. A lot of the time, we put in 20-plus hours a week in the gym, whereas most high school teams have maybe two practices per week for a couple hours each. Now, personally I have always said that competitive cheer is different. They practice more often and tend to have more difficult skills, as well as the fact that they have to learn to move in sync with each other during a routine. But, gymnastics is so much different from every other sport. You know if, for perhaps the most common example, a football player tried to get through one gymnastics practice, well…they just simply couldn’t. As we always say, “if gymnastics were easy, they would call it football.”
7. Wait, normal people don’t shave their legs in the winter? What?
You’ve always shaved your legs year-round and you think it’s very strange that other people don’t do that. Even though you may not actually be doing gymnastics anymore, you still continue this because you’ve never really known any different. Besides, who doesn’t like smooth legs?
8. You tend to keep track of all of your old teammates who made it as Elites or are competing for a collegiate team.
Odds are that you have at least one friend who has become an Elite or who is competing for the NCAA at their university. You can’t wait to see them compete and you definitely brag about them to all of your non-gymnast friends. You also know that, no matter the distance or time since you’ve last seen each other, you’ll always have your teammates. They’re some of the best friends you’ve ever had and you’ve probably spent more time with them than your own family over the years.
9. Your old compulsory routines are forever engrained in your mind.
You can still do your entire level 5 routine and you don’t even need the music because you constantly sing it in your head. You can probably even do your level 6 routine! But you cringe when you think about what it was like to go to a competition and hear the compulsory floor music after you became a level 7. You don’t know how you ever sat and listened to the same music a couple hundred times at a competition, but you did!
10. When you try to explain a skill to your friends and they look at you like you’re speaking a different language.
“I was doing a Yurchenko on vault—” “A Yur—what??” “Ugh, hold on…” *gets phone out*. You’ve given up on explaining any skill verbally because no one ever understands what you’re trying to say. You simply pull out your phone and get on YouTube because it’s so much simpler.
11. When you go into a gym, you can’t just sit and look, you’ve got to touch something (aka everything).
First of all, when your friend mentions going to the gym, you get excited at first because you don’t realize that she means an actual exercise gym. You just automatically assume she means a gymnastics gym, because really, what other kind of gym is there? But as soon as you walk into a gymnastics gym you subconsciously touch everything. And you probably feel the need to attempt some of your old skills, not realizing until the next morning how much of a mistake that was because you’re more sore than you’ve ever been, and that’s saying a lot.
12. You still love the feel of chalk of your hands.
You’ve never understood why your friends at school never liked chalk being on their hands when they would write on the chalk board. You practically bathed in it every day at practice, so it was nothing to have a little bit on your fingers at school. Occasionally, you had a teammate at the gym who didn’t like chalk so you tortured them by purposefully running your grip down their arm or throwing chalk dust in their hair, out of pure love, of course!
13. You would never, in a million years, buy a blue blazer.
As you get older and begin to transition into the professional world, you may find that you need to go out and buy a nice business suit. Anything navy blue is absolutely off the table because only judges wear blue blazers. You may even get a little nervous if you see someone in a navy blue suit in public.
14. You have an emotional attachment to your grips and tiger paws.
It doesn’t matter how old you get, somewhere in your house will be your old pairs of grips and tiger paws. They hold sentimental value; you can’t simply just get rid of them. You know they smell and maybe they have little tears in them or the Velcro is messed up, but you can’t bring yourself to throw them away. It’s OK, we all do it, and there’s absolutely no shame.
15. You’re like a kid in a candy store when the summer Olympics are on.
Every four years, you find yourself glued to your couch watching NBC because they have full coverage of the summer Olympics and gymnastics is basically the centerpiece of the whole thing. You blow up your friends’ twitter feeds with #TeamUSA, and you know they’re probably getting annoyed with it but you just don’t care! It’s the only time that people actually take notice of how awesome the sport of gymnastics really is, and you take full advantage of it.
16. You’re still a little bit socially awkward from all of the years spent in the gym.
Your friend asks if you want to go out and you look at them like, “‘out’? What is ‘out’? I don’t know what ‘out’ is.” You never really had much of a social life outside of the gym so you never really grew accustomed to the ways of “normal” people. You never got to go out on Friday night because you had practice early on Saturday morning, so you’re not really sure what to do when you go out with your friends now.
17. You’re still afraid of public speaking.
You hate giving presentations in your classes and at work. Your palms get sweaty, your hands start shaking, and your stomach is in knots. Everyone else is used to this by now but you still aren’t. Your friends all think you should have no problems at all and they say things like, “you perform in front of hundreds of people, why are you so nervous for this?” What they obviously don’t understand is that we don’t have to speak in front of said people at competitions. We just go out and do the routines we’ve done hundreds of times in the gym. There really is no comparison.
18. You’ll always regret quitting, no matter what the reason was.
Oftentimes you find yourself asking why you ever quit the sport. There was probably a good reason at the time, such as an injury, financial reasons, or a simple lack of love for the sport. Nevertheless, you secretly will always regret your decision to quit. I’ve heard this is something that you never really get over, no matter how much time passes; you just learn to live with it.
Sometimes you wish could still be training and competing, and that it could be just like old times with your teammates in the gym. But you know that you’ll always have all of those incredible friends and amazing memories. As they always say, “Once a gymnast, always a gymnast.”
