Shawn Johnson feels at home again back in gym

Liang Chow has all his team girls standing in a circle doing a warm-up drill that looks like a gymnastics version of the old kids' game "Duck, Duck, Goose."

The girls, many of them in grade school or junior high, are smiling and laughing and having fun at Chow's gym in West Des Moines as they chase one another around the floor before the real work begins.

One of the smiling, running girls has become a grown woman almost overnight. She's Shawn Johnson, Olympic champion and Dancing with the Stars winner.

Though Johnson is 19 now and too old for Duck, Duck, Goose, she looks right at home with the little ones, right where she belongs. Not on the road making another appearance or launching a new product, but in the gym working as hard as she can for as long as she can and seeing where it leads.

On Saturday it leads to Chicago and the CoverGirl Classic.

In May of 2010 she announced her comeback. A few months later she made her first appearance at the National Team Training Camp since the summer of 2008.

This is Johnson's first competition since the Olympics and, after nearly three years out of the gym and an ACL injury, she can't stop feeling she isn't ready.

"I'm starting to really freak out," she says after the second practice session of the day. "It's scary getting back into the spotlight. I've been safe in the comfort of my own gym. Everything was talk up till now. But now it's all turning real. I keep telling Chow I don't feel ready and he tells me I'll never feel ready."

The smile tells you she'll be fine by the weekend.

"I'm happy, healthy, in shape. I'm living a good lifestyle again," she says. "That might turn out to be the best reward of all. … I took off I did a lot of cool things, but I wasn't very happy. I missed gymnastics a lot and I'm finally back to being who I was meant to be. I feel like me again."

But here's the catch. This Shawn Johnson sometimes makes the mistake of comparing herself to the Shawn Johnson of 2008, and that way of thinking doesn't work in the gym and on the podium.

She's slowly breaking herself of the habit, thanks to a recent trip to Starbucks where she ran into a guy who gave her some unsolicited advice. Johnson gets unsolicited advice all the time, so that wasn't a surprise.

The surprise this time was how much sense it made.

The man said, "Hi, how's it going? May I share something with you?"

Johnson said yes and she's glad she did because they talked for an hour, and his words hit home: "You'll never be what you were in 2008 because you're not the same person."

So don't try. Instead of comparing yourself with that person, compare yourself with the gymnast who could barely perform a common release move on uneven bars a few months ago.

Compare yourself with the gymnast who couldn't complete a full beam routine a few weeks ago.

Instead of thinking about how far you have to go, remember how far you've come since stepping back in the gym.

"I was so far away from what an elite gymnast should be," Johnson says, "but it really helped put things in perspective. I didn't beat myself up so much after that. Every day I look at the progress I've made."

It was frustrating at first. Athletes want to see immediate improvement. When they don't, it's harder to stay motivated.

Chow, the U.S. women's coach at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, had to change his coaching methods to accommodate an older Johnson. You don't work a 19-year-old the way you work an eighth-grader, which sounds strange. Where else in life does that apply?

Real life is just the opposite, but this isn't real life. It's women's gymnastics and the body won't take the punishment.

"There's a lot to be done in the next 10 months or so," Chow says. "That's the challenge. We'll see how much she can handle."

The torn ACL, a skiing mishap, set back her training schedule.

"My knee has really been stubborn the past six months or so," she says. "Every time we try to push it, it hurts again. So progress has been a little slower than we hoped."

Meanwhile, Chow goes to work each day with three practice plans.

Plan A might include, say, 10 bars routines.

Plan B might mean five.

Plan C? Chow laughs.

"We're all going home."

Chow looks at Johnson now and says, "If you don't have that knee problem, it would have been way easier. You could take more of a pounding."

So he motivates in different ways. Last week, he told Johnson if she got all her bars work done in the morning, she wouldn't have to come back in the afternoon.

"She was going like a machine," he says.

Slowly the fruits of her work reveal themselves. Everyone in the gym remembers the day Johnson hit something called a "shaposh" on bars.

It's a tricky release move named after Soviet gymnast Natalia Shaposhnikova. You start on the low bar and shoot blindly to the high bar.

"It's not in my routine now," she says. "It's a skill I wanted to learn but couldn't because I was always too small. I was so happy, I was jumping around like a 6-year-old."

Welcome back, kid.