Some More Funny Stories

Hey Guys

So apparently you liked my other post about funny stories, so because I'm a people pleaser, I'm gonna write another one!

1. "It's not that hard!"
Once upon a gym practice, the whole squad was on beam.  We were basically all having the exact same mental block...leaps on beam. Now let me tell you something...you don't know real pain until you split the beam.  If you don't know what that means...

Courtesy of: Gif Shot

Yeah...that's what splitting the beam looks like...So back to the story, we were all being wimps and not wanting to do leaps because doing a leap gives you probably the highest risk of splitting the beam...here's why...

That's me by the way

After watching that video, imagine what would have happened if my foot had slipped when I landed...ouch.  I would have fallen, smashed into the beam, crashed onto the mat and lay on the ground in pain curled up in a ball holding my leg/ankle/whatever I hit on the way down for about five minutes.  It is not fun.  It's happened to me more times than I can count. In fact, it happened to me last night...   Oh my, this post is turning into a beam rant. Back to the story. So Tina, my coach, was getting mad at us for not being "brave" and just "going for it". She then proceeded to step onto the low beam, after screaming to us for ten minutes about how easy it was and how we wouldn't get hurt. She told us that it was so easy, she could do it.  What happened next was hilarious.  She did her leap on the low beam, landed wrong, rolled her ankle, fell on the ground and her ankle started to swell up....Yeah.  After this whole lecture of how "it isn't that hard" and how "we wont get hurt."  We didn't do leaps on beam that day...Her ankle was purple and swollen for like two weeks.

2. Little Tree
I don't know if you guys will find this story is funny as I do… but let's just give it a whirl.  Before we vault, we have to move mats and stuff so we can get it how we like.  My team does this thing called "ants “ where we get the mat and put it over our head and carry it like that because it's a lot lighter that way… kind of like ants… so one thing about ants is that if you're in the front, carrying the front of the mat, you better be really quick to duck when we throw the mat.  Okay slowdown Maggie… what I mean by throw the mat is when we get the mat to the destination we want it at, we all just throw it forward.  Sometimes we don't throw it hard enough and the person in the front gets knocked down by the end of the mat.  So we were moving a dead mat one time, A dead mat is just a mat that has been used so much that it's just floppy and dead, Tasia was in the front and we threw the mat, it landed on her head.  It was really funny because as you probably know, Tasia is freakishly tall, and basically she was standing there and the mat was flopped over her so she looked like a tree or a mountain or something.  We all laughed and said she looked like a little tree and now we call her "LT".

So I only told two stories because if I wrote another one i'd be hella over my word limit.
Vote on my poll!!

Maggie

How a Gymnastics Competition Works

Hello Friends,

So as I have previously mentioned, I am going to be blogging about all of my competitions or "meets" this year, so I thought you might want some background info.  A gymnastics competition is referred to as a "meet". Don't ask me why, it just is.  So in my level, we have around 5-6 meets per competition season, plus state meet, and if we qualify, regionals.  Normally, all of our meets are in Utah except for regionals.  Regionals is out of state, last year it was in Arizona, and this year it will be in California!

Every year, around the end of October, we receive a "meet schedule".  It pretty much tells us what meets we are going to that competition season and when.  My meet schedule for this season looks like this...

My competition schedule.

Competition season for gymnastics is usually from December-May.

So now into how a meet works.
There are two parts to a gymnastics meet.  Individual awards and Team awards.  Individual awards are First, Second, Third place for one gymnast.  The top three scores from one team are averaged and entered into team awards.  Team awards are First, Second, Third place for the entire team.  So there's a basic explanation of how awards works.  Now onto some technical stuff…

In gymnastics there are four events, beam, bars, floor and vault. Each gymnast competes every event and receives a score from the judges out of 10.  A gymnasts score starts from 10 and for every mistake they make in their routine, the get deductions.  (I know, super positive right?) On every event there are two judges, they each give the athlete a score out of 10, and then their two scores are averaged to make your final score.  You get one try for your routine on every event, except for vault.  For vault, you get to do two vaults, whichever vault scores higher is the one that stays.  There are five sections for individual awards; bars, beam, floor, vault and all-around.  All around is where you average all of your scores for all four events.  To win first place on all-around is a HUGE deal!

I do a gymnastics program called Xcel.  There are five levels in Xcel; bronze, silver, gold, platinum and diamond.  This competition season,  here's what my team looks like...

Tasia: Silver 
Brenna: silver
Emery: silver
Kylie: gold
Maggie: gold

Since my whole team is silver and gold, we will most likely be going to meets at around the same times.  The only exception will be when Kylie go to meets where Silver and gold do not compete at the same time.  Unfortunately for me and Kylie, this year, Cody has decided that she no longer wants to do gymnastics, it is very sad because Cody is like my sister,  I don't want to talk too much about it in this post, but basically we don't have a gold team this year.  The reason for this is, in order to have a team, you must have at least three gymnasts competing in the same level.  Me and Kylie will not be competing for team awards this year. ☹

So there you have it, a basic rundown of how these competitions will work.  Sorry if this post was kind of boring, but I thought you might need to know some of this stuff for my future posts about competitions.

Me and Cody last year after winning first place
in team awards. (single tear)

Ta Ta,
Maggie

6 Things Normal People Don't Understand About Gymnasts.

1. We spit on our grips.
So grips are those things that gymnasts wear on there hands during bars.

Photo Creds: inthecompanyofstrangers

<------those things

So in order to keep the chalk on our grips, we use water...or spit. So anyway, people think that it's weird that we spit on our grips.  I don't know why... I mean, we also use water on them and spit is stickier sooo...

2. We are OBSESSED with leotards

Nobody knows why, but at least in my team, we are OBSESSED with leos.  They are just so fun and colorful and YAHS! Whenever somebody on our team gets a new leo we all get super excited and it's like they're getting married or something.  Everybody crowds around them and tells them how cute they look in in and ask where they got it from.  So yeah...we love leos.

I'm getting better at the whole "drawing" thing

My Leo Collection. I have like...a lot

3.  The bond in our team

So our team has a family-like bond.  Now I only see my team at practice 2-3 times a week...not as much as the elite gymnasts...but still.  We basically see each other every weekend and practice 2 and a half hours together every day.  We laugh with each other.  Cry in front of each other.  Practically know everything about each other. Nobody but the people in the team can understand but basically my team is my second family.

4. DON'T BREAK THE CHALK BLOCKS!!!!

So on bars, we use chalk on our grips to help our grips grip to the bar better so that we don't fall off when we are up on the high bar.  The thing is, it's way easier to load your grips up with chalk when using a block because you can pretty much just rub it over your grips and BOOM...all chalked up.  It is much harder, however, to chalk up your grips with loose chalk because you have to rub it into your grips and it just takes longer.  Anywho, it really sucks when people crush up the chalk blocks because, then theres no more blocks left.  So if we catch somebody crushing up the chalk blocks...we get mad.

This is a chalk block.
(how cool are my zebra grips?!?)

5.  The floor is NOT a trampoline
If you were to actually jump on the floor, you would be surprised as to how un-bouncy it was. The reason everybody thinks that the floor is so bouncy is because when olympic gymnasts do floor the go super high because well...they're olympians.

6. We are super exited to learn our routines!
So one thing you should know is that over the summer we don't have routines, we pretty much just learn new skills and such, so it's really exciting to be able to learn a brand-new routine made specially for you right before the start of competition season.  It's fun to discover what skills you will be competing that season and it is especially exciting to hear your new floor music for the first time ever.  It's just super fun in general to learn new routines!

So yeah, those are some of the things that normal people don't understand about gymnasts/gymnastics. If you want, leave a comment telling me what I should post about next. Vote on my poll!! Ok that's all bye.
-Maggie