Which Way's Up

At the end of last year when it was announced that Mary Lou Retton was in the fight of her life, one of the side notes was that, over the course of that life, she’d had some thirty surgeries to repair a long list of injuries spawned by her gymnastics era.

Thirty?!?! Yes, thirty.

Just after that detail was dropped, civilians across America gasped with horror. THIRTY?! In my home, my husband immediately announced that he would never put our children in gymnastics. That was very reassuring considering our children are 18 and 21 years old (and neither has ever liked doing the sports).

On the flip side, gymnasts across America (retired or active, it didn’t really matter) shrugged before starting a quick tally of their own body parts: How many surgeries have I had? How many broken bones? How many tears of this or that? What will have to be fixed, eventually?

“Eventually” is a favorite word for athletes when speaking of their beaten bodies. “I’ll get that fixed, eventually,” we say while continuing to roughhouse our aches and pains.

When Mary Lou said, “Thirty surgeries,” gymnasts across America thought, “Well, yeah, that tracks.”

My current surgical count is eight: Both feet, twice on my right shoulder, three times on my right wrist, and a double-hernia repair. In a few years, that number will likely rise to ten: I’ve got a scope and cartilage retrieval scheduled for April on my right knee and, for 2025, fresh, lab-grown cartilage will be put back into that same knee (unless Alabama declares it a person).

Breaks? I’ve actually done fairly well with a mere two: one bone chip in the wrist and one fracture that was discovered on an x-ray of my lower back long after it had healed. I still have no clue when or how the fracture occurred.

Sprains? Table for three, all recouped with time in a boot.

Cortisone shots? I think I own the company.

When I heard Mary Lou say “thirty,” I felt relieved. At least I hadn’t had thirty, am I right?

Gymnastics is a true minefield for injury. Ironically, many of those injuries are not traumatic but rather the culprit of years of pounding on joints. It’s not that there aren’t traumatic injuries, but the most common among gymnasts is a badly rolled ankle suffered when walking off a landing mat. It’s an injury that most often occurs following a perfect landing on a skill that involves flipping and spinning several feet in the air, saluting a judge, and then mentally checking out for the walk off the mat. And, quite frankly, if the mat doesn’t get a gymnast at least once in their career, then a curb certainly will.

Four-inch beam? No problem. Stepping off a curb? Danger, Will Robinson.

Yuka Sugiura, a gymnastics neuro performance coach, explained it all recently on Instagram (watch here at Level Pro Neuro). The summary of her work was discovering that the hours gymnasts spend training within a 5 -8” vision field actually untrains their peripheral vision. Is that not nuts? Also, this explains so much. I suppose the good news is that gymnasts first learn how to fall. That training lasts forever, by the way. I proved that just last week when I fell frontwards down the last two stairs into our basement. I never did see my life flash before my eyes as I was too busy pulling my arms in, tucking my head, and prepping my left quad to take the brunt of the crash.

How many 52-year-olds walk away from a fall like that with only a scraped knee and a very impressed husband?

Those injuries collect from the endless pushing, pulling, and pounding on joints? I mean, they suck but I do think today’s gymnasts are reaping the benefits of the damage to us older, retired ones. Back in the nineteen hundreds, training was more about the numbers (repetitive pounding) than about less-is-more (quality over quantity). There weren’t wrist braces in every size or squishy mats galore. Mats weren’t stacked to the ceiling for soft landings and the medical field certainly wasn’t filled with experts on high-level athletics as it is today.

Heck, when I was invited to my first competitive team we started each workout by rolling out the wrestling mat for our floor routines. Beams were still wooden (I have little sympathy for those who straddle today’s softer beams). Grips were very basic and certainly not required. If we left slabs of our skin on the uneven bars, we dashed to the bathroom to pee on our palm (much like the solution to a jelly-fish sting) before returning to finish our sets.

And that next surgery I’m slated for? To repair cartilage collected when I missed a foot on a side-aerial and caught the edge of my knee cap on the corner of the beam when I was sixteen. I did go the an orthopedic doctor and he told us that I had taken off a few chunks of cartilage and to have a nice day. I think he called them cartilage mice. Well, it seemed legit at the time.

While I am not so old school to think that today’s gymnasts have it easy, I am mildly jealous.

Mary Lou trained in the years that I was training. Though we never crossed paths (hahahahaha), I know exactly what type of equipment she trained on. I also what her coaches, the now-in-hiding Karolyis, were probably like. There were a few clubs in my area that followed their philosophies. It was easy to spot their gymnasts as they were pale, too thin, and covered in ace bandages.

That’s correct. I went to a club that wasn’t quite as cutthroat, I was levels below “Olympian,” yet I am still working on fixing the physical damage. Gymnastics is hard, both mentally and physically.

Thirty surgeries? Easy to believe.

If you assume that Mary Lou would never have put her girls in gymnastics, you’d be wrong. All four were gymnasts with a couple competing straight through college. I would have done the same with mine if they’d showed interest. I won’t even attempt to describe how it feels to fly through the air, flipping and twisting, so often that it takes nary a thought. Yes, I would do it all again if given the chance and knowing what’s to come. Even now, as adult gymnastics gains popularity, I long to give it another shot (for fun, of course), but I also know what a terrible idea that would be.

I was still flipping at 50, though only on trampolines. I had a crazy crash and as I was flying through the air (while assuming all the correct crash positions), I had a lot of thoughts about how hard this was going to be to explain to my husband who thought I was working out in the other kind of gym (tomato-tomahto).

As quickly took inventory of any damage (thankfully, none) I realized that it was time to walk away, though very carefully and with full intentions of tapping into that untrained peripheral vision.

That last part? Still a work in progress but at least I’ve still got skills at falling.