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Gravity is something you don't fully appreciate until it's pounding the crap out of you with your own body, and gymnastics might as well be Latin for "facial reconstructive surgery" as far as I'm concerned.

I didn't start right off with the backflip -- I had to work my way up to that. Believe it or not, front tucks are actually harder than back tucks, but they start you off with the former, possibly in an attempt to weed out the weak ones quicker. The "nice" thing about a back tuck is that if you miss, you'll probably just land on your back and get the wind knocked out of you, like I brilliantly managed to do one time on the hard border of an otherwise springy trampoline. With front tucks, on the other hand, you are more likely to land on your face if you don't put enough (or put too much) momentum into the process, as I did probably hundreds of times.

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But you look really cool right before it happens.

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After around a month of floundering in an "adults" gymnastics class with one other girl who was about to head back to college, I was placed in a class with a bunch of competition-level high school girls. This was more damaging to my physical well-being than I could have possibly imagined. The girls were absolute sweethearts, and I came to appreciate them as the hyper-athletic sisters I would never want to be forced to tattle on. The problem was that anytime they were feeling a little down over not landing a stunt, I'd still be looking at them in awe for getting as far as they did -- a look and sentiment that could apparently come across as patronizing. This would lead to a "You try it, asshole" aimed in my direction, and I would have to step up. I was suffering for my art, and also the approval of high school sophomores.