The chalk under your nails, the rips on your hands, the countless injuries, and the mental games. These are the things I don’t miss about competitive gymnastics. I have found that people think of female gymnasts as dainty girls who prance around in leotards singing and dancing while doing the occasional forward roll. But next time you want to take the plunge into that foam pit, think again. Gymnastics is more of a push yourself until your legs give out sport, and in all reality, the pit is disgusting. Who knows what kinds of bugs are really crawling around in there. But although I cringe at the thought of doing hundreds of pushups everyday and the pop-click-snap injuries, I can’t help but think about how much I regret leaving the thing that provided me with so much happiness, growth, lifelong friends, and killer abs.

Gymnastics tells you ‘no’ all day long. It mocks you over and over again, telling you that you’re either going to have to blame yourself or your parents for getting you to stick with this sport for so long. I can’t even lie about enjoying the idea of running full speed towards a stationary object, because that’d just be false. I can’t lie about enjoying rubbing magnesium carbonate (chalk) on my hands, a powder that I place essentially all of my trust in so that I don’t slip off the bar. Picture nails on a chalkboard: and then cringe, because that’s what its like to have ripped up dry skin after simply touching the bar. Because really the only thing more fun than rips, is when your rips get rips, and don’t even get me started on what that looks like. Gymnastics looks cute when you’re three, four, or even seven. You work towards getting new skills everyday and they come easily, but they forget to mention that as you level up, not only do the skills get harder, but naturally, so does achieving them.

At this point, it probably makes a lot of sense as to why I quit gymnastics, as I make it sound mildly horrible. But four years later, I am still looking back through all my pictures for the best ones to Instagram for a #throwbackthursday. I still like to show off the few skills I can still do and would sometimes drop everything to just get back into that gym and flip around for a while. I still laugh about all the memories in the gym with my best friends, as some of these girls are still my good friends and will continue to be for years to come. I reminisce on everything my coaches taught me, and what I learned still resonates with me today. I miss their thick Ukrainian accents and harsh criticisms, knowing they always intended to make me better as not only a gymnast, but also a person.

Gymnastics teaches you a lot of things you don’t even realize. I am more organized because of gymnastics. Not only did practice everyday force me into getting all of my work done early, teaching me to avoid procrastinating as after a late night workout all I would want to do is sleep, but it allowed me to spend time on things that really mattered. I am lucky today to still hold some of this self-motivation and fear of procrastination while working towards getting my undergraduate degree while away at school.

I am more driven because of gymnastics. It is easy to get caught up in things that are less important to your overall success in life. Gymnastics forced me to get up in the morning, get everything done, and make goals for the future in order to stay on top of things. I believe I am now more persistent in achieving my goals and work harder to show I am capable of accomplishing what I want.

I am also a better friend because of gymnastics. I spend more time with people I care about to build the relationships that are most important to me. One of my best friends came out of that gym (Hi Sammy!!), and if you counted the hours, she is probably one of the people I have spent most of my time with throughout my childhood. Gymnastics allowed me to develop friendships that I will have for a lifetime and for that I am forever grateful.

However, my time in the gym was cut short when my head started to mess with me. I was suddenly overtaken with fears of falling, specifically flipping backwards, which limited my growth in the sport and in my persona as a whole. I fought for a while against my head trying to move forward, but it eventually became too much and I got too caught up in hating my time in the gym that I needed a break. I joined the cross-country team at my high school and got quickly caught up in that, forgetting about the years I had spent swinging from the bars with a sense of freedom I had trouble finding in any other setting. That season was soon over and I struggled to become interested in other things, but I never went back. And to this day I regret never going back, even just to sit and watch, and I wish that I had spent some time trying to rekindle that love for the sport that I knew I loved but was just denying it.

My senior year of high school I looked to my high school gymnastics team to get back into it, knowing that I could have one last go at that thing I loved so much before regretting I truly never went back. That one season provided me with so much more than I could possibly have ever imagined, allowing me to rekindle my love for that sport with a team that accepted me as a senior in high school with open arms. When I see other girls struggling with it, I urge them not to make my same mistake. Gymnastics takes so much from you on a daily basis but makes you grow immensely and come out so much stronger because of it. A loss of time to socialize with your friends outside of your sport only brings you closer to the people who chose the same path as you, the people who you may ultimately connect with the most anyway. The physical injuries drive you insane from all the time you spend in that high ceiling chalk infested space but allow you to take time for yourself to really remember the things you love most about it. But mostly, gymnastics makes you grow as a person, and I can’t help but wonder what would have been different today if I had kept with it.

This is my love letter to gymnastics. The sport that taught me so much about myself and about the world as a whole. I look today at the little girls who jump around the gym with so much promise, hoping their heads won’t mess with them and they will grow into strong successful athletes. So next time you think gymnastics is for the girly girls who don’t want to do a real sport, remind me to show you the rips on my hands. It’s not called gym-nice-tics for a reason.