When I first saw Nadia Comaneci compete in the 1976 Olympic games I knew right away that I too wanted to be a gymnast. I went to sleep at night with images of Nadia's routines playing over and over in my mind. I dreamed of doing aerial cartwheels, back walk-overs and flip-flops with the same ease and grace as she. I envisioned myself swinging on the uneven parallel bars, catapulting my body over the vault and leaping effortlessly on the beam. I was charmed by her poise and playfulness and dreamed of enchanting audiences with my flawless routines and endearing personality at the next Olympics. 

I signed up at a local gymnastics club when I was 11 years old and for the next four years gymnastics held as demanding a pull on my time as music. I had played the violin since I was 5 and practiced nearly an hour a day. I took private lessons once a week, participated in several different youth orchestras, and attended summer music camps. While I enjoyed my participation in both activities, gymnastics was new and exciting and offered me vastly different experiences and challenges. 

I loved the sport and I progressed quickly. I wasn’t the strongest or the fastest or the most graceful, but I showed up every day, took risks and worked hard. Gymnastics was always on my mind. I loved the thrill of learning new skills and would lie in bed imagining myself performing the moves perfectly that I had worked on earlier that day. At school, during recess, I met up with friends who were also gymnasts and we’d practice doing back walkovers and cartwheels on a narrow cement ledge that was about the width of a balance beam. We'd talk about new skills that we were working on and gossip about the coaches and girls at the club. Eventually, I was invited to be on the team and represent our club at regional meets. 

It didn't take me long to realize though that gymnastics and playing a musical instrument were not compatible pursuits. Gymnast's bodies take a beating. In fact, the path to Olympic glory is littered with the bodies of injured gymnasts. I recall being at a meet once in Sacramento and seeing a girl from another gym fall from the beam. She was simply trying to hold a side handstand but her center of balance was off. Her feet were too far over her body. Rather than concede to the fall and pivot so her feet would land on the floor, she kept arching her back until the inevitable happened and she fell four feet straight down with her arms above her head. Unable to control the rotation of her body, the weight and speed of her body crashing onto her arms and shoulders created a disturbingly loud crunching sound. I don’t know what injuries she sustained but I do recall her motionless body crumpled on the ground and the insanely long time it took for the ambulance to arrive.

My own experiences with injuries were fortunately relatively minor, but since playing the violin requires the use of fine motor skills, even the smallest injury to either one of my hands was problematic. Showing up to a violin lesson nursing a hurt finger or a sore wrist, would earn me a lecture from my teacher about the risks I was taking. She also did not hide her disapproval of the time gymnastics was taking away from my violin practicing. 

My mother, too, was clearly more supportive of my musical pursuits, arguing that while I could play music my entire life, I would only be able to do gymnastics for a few more years.  I think both my mother and my violin teacher were secretly pleased when I broke my toe and had to use crutches for six weeks. I still went to the gym but I was only allowed to do upper body exercises.

Eventually, I did quit the club's gymnastics team but it wasn’t until I was in High School that I gave up on the sport altogether. I was taking a gymnastics class at school for PE credit when one day I did a relatively simple handspring vault. I don’t think I fell or even hurt myself on the landing but what I do recall is feeling incredibly dizzy all of a sudden. It was a dizziness that didn’t go away for weeks. I recall lying in bed with my eyes closed feeling like I was in a washing machine, spinning wildly out of control. Apparently, I was suffering the unsettling effects of a middle ear infection. It was an awful sensation and once it passed, all my dreams of Olympic gold dissipated as quickly as they had come.

I still enjoy watching women’s gymnastics, but the physical activities I choose to engage in are much safer and would have the full approval of my mother and my violin teacher: lap swimming, yoga and my favorite of all, the refined sport of fine motor gymnastics whereby fingers run, leap and slide along the strings of a narrow wooden fingerboard. 

Addendum: That is, of course, until 10 weeks ago when I fell at home and broke my wrist. Who would have thought that I should have added walking down a flight of stairs to my list of hazardous activities?

Photo Credit: Me! posing for the cover of a magazine I created for a middle school class project. Photo taken by my brother-in-law, Rob Egashira.