Saying Goodbye :(

Wow. This has been one crazy year.

If you are unaware, this blog is an assignment for Honors English and my teacher told us to write our final post about ways we have changed this year. Since I live on the wild side (and because I asked Mr. Parker and he said it was ok) I am going to write more about THINGS that have changed in my life over the year.

1. Cody Quit Gymnastics
If you are a peasant and didn't know... My best friend quit gymnastics at the beginning of the year. It was tragic at the time but it's A-OK because were still friends, even though we don't necessarily see each other nearly as much as we used to, we still hang out and play pool *trying not to laugh at how much me and cody suck at pool because people are still taking the sage test rn* It still sucks not having Cody at gym but its all good in the hood.

2. Kylie joined our team!
After Cody left, gymnastics was kinda rough, no offense to my other teammates but I didn't have my twin, The Co to my Ma (maggie + cody = maco). BUT THEN...Kylie joined and at first I was all like "Ew she's gross and also better than me at beam" but then I was like "hey, she's kinda chill".  Over the school/competition year we became BFFs. Basically now Kylie is my sister. We are the kind of friends where we are so close that we can fight with each other instead of awkwardly agreeing with each other so we don't hurt feelings.

3. I had the best season of my life.
This competition season was one of the best. I placed at every competition and my team always swept the podium! I got some of the highest scores ever and had a blast.

4. I started training with the Optional Girls
This year, about half way through the competition season, I started training with the optional girls (level 6-10). This was an incredible opportunity for me because I got much better coaching and the gymnastics was just more fun. This is one of the main reasons why I did so well at State and Regionals.

5. I got 2nd All-Around at state
At the beginning of the year, if you had told me that I would get 2nd all around at state, that the difference between me and first was 0.025, that I would score a 37.1 and that I made the state team, I would tell you that you were crazy. I know for a fact that these scores were a direct result of my new coaches and training schedule! State was an amazing experience and I wish I could do it all over again!

6. I competed for Utah at Regionals
I had an absolutely AMAZING experience competing on the Utah State gymnastics team in Long Beach at regionals. I met so many amazing girls and had an amazing experience. The Utah team got 3rd (that's really good)!!

The Utah State Gymnastics Team

7. I quit
Sadly this competition season was my last. I have decided to quit gymnastics. Gymnastics has been one of the best decisions I have ever made and I am so thankful. Thank you so much to everyone who has made the past years of my life so amazing. Thank you to my team for all the amazing memories and experiences. I will never forget any of it! I love you all to the moon and back!

Goodbye,
Maggie

I don't know why but this picture of me and Kylie running into
the sunset seemed necessary. 

State Meet!

AAHAGHAHAAAJAAaaa!!!!

Holy Guuuuuuuuuuuuuuacamole!!

I probably just had THE best 3 days of my life!

Wednesday
Kylie and I set off for St. George! It was about a 5 hour drive...it seems really long but it was fun because we watched movies and jammed to music the whole way down! We went to our resort and immediately hit the pool! We swam for about an hour and then hit the spa! We went in the steam room, the 'relaxation room' and the INCREDIBLE showers! (seriously though I can't even describe how cool these showers were!) We headed into town for pizza and a movie! It was a SUPER fun night!

Thursday (MEET DAY!)
We woke up early Thursday morning and sat in hammocks to watch the sun rise and then headed to the resort restaurant for breakfast. We enjoyed a breakfast buffet and tried to get in touch with Brenna and Tasia. We had about 2 hours before our spa appointments so we went on a short hike. We found this huge rock spiral thingy in the middle of nowhere and walked through the entire thing! (It was questionable because it looked a little satanic). We "sacrificed" our hair ties at the middle of the spiral because apparently you have to sacrifice something. We went for a quick dip in the pool and we ran into Brenna who just so happened to be on her way to the spa! Since our spa appointment was in about 30 minutes, we got out of the pool and went with Brenna to the spa. We showered and changed into robes and slippers and headed into the "relaxation room" to wait with Brenna...and guess who happened to be in the relaxation room...TASIA! When they called me and Kylie we headed up to the salon and got our hair and makeup done. After our spa treatment we (the 4 of us) walked to all of our rooms to get our leos and warmups. (this took a while because the resort was VERY spread out and we were all in different buildings (except for me and Kylie of course)). Afterwards we headed to the meet!! It was about a 30 minute drive.

The competition went AMAZINGLY! I won't bore you with details but I got 3 personal bests on vault, bars and all around!
Scores:
Bars: 9.355
Beam: 8.9
Floor: 9.4
Vault: 9.4
AA: 37.1 (!!!!!)

Awards was amazing! As we were waiting for our awards, these meet people came up to Me and Kylie and told us that we were in the top 5 of all 72 girls there! That meant that we had made the Utah state team to compete against the other states at regionals!!!!

Awards:
Vault: 1st
Bars: 2nd
Beam: 4th
Floor: 2nd
AA: 2nd

The girl that beat me and won first all around beat me by only .005!!!!!!!
All in all one of the best meets i've ever had!!

Saturday
We got up early again and cleaned the hotel room and packed our bags. Emery has a pool house in St.George so we went there for a pool party! It was great! We drove home and it was depressing because our amazing trip was over :(

Here are some pictures!!

In the "relaxation room" at the spa

Pool Party!

Pool Party Selfie

Driving into St. George

The relaxation room

xoxo
Gossip Girl

Jk

-Maggie

Team Dinners Part 2

Oh hello there friends. Welcome back

If you are cool then you probs read my post called team dinners and in that post I mentioned that I would be making "Team Dinners Part 2"...so here it is...

The Spaghetti and Salmon Dinner

The spaghetti and salmon dinner was hosted by Brenna and it was at her house (obviously). This one was very fun because Brenna is like super rich and so she has a huge basement and it has a beam, tumbling mats, and more! As you can imagine, a bunch of gymnasts with a huge basement and gymnastics equipment made for a very fun night. Another super fun thing we did was play twister... This may not sound super exciting but when you are a gymnast and you can do backbends and splits and such, it was very exciting and much more fun!

Quotes of the night:

"hold on one sec, I have to go fart in a pillow" -Brenna

Brenna: *farts*  ♫"oops I did it again"♫

(Playing twister) *Maggie pushes Kylie over* "I win!"

All in all the spaghetti and salmon dinner was a very fun night and one of my favorite team dinners so far!

Here are some pictures and videos from that night.

Twister!

Just to give you an idea of what our team dinners are like...

The Chinese Dinner

Now I bet you're wondering, why the heck did you have a Chinese dinner?? This dinner was hosted by Tasia. Her dad just so happens to be the Chinese teacher at Roland Hall so he decided to make us Chinese food.  Tasia lives right across the street from PCMR and also right across the street from A private pool.  It was super fun because it was just me Tasia and Brenna (everyone else was out of town) and we had so much fun running around the neighborhood and night swimming in the pool.   When we got back from the pool dinner was ready and let me just say it was delicious!

Storytime!  You can imagine in the middle of February it was quite cold outside and we happened to be walking around in our swimsuits so to stay warm, we wrapped our towels around our necks like capes and it was quite funny because we looked ridiculous and we were pretending that we were Buzz lightyear.

Another Story! When we were done swimming we decided to get showers at the pool.  As I mentioned earlier we walked there in our swimsuits so we didn't exactly have clothes with us. After our shower I used my towel as a skirt and Tasia's sweatshirt as a shirt and I looked very hysterically terrible!

Here are some of the pictures that we took that night! (we tried to be artsy in the picture of us jumping into the pool together... Shortly after taking that picture, tasia pretty much landed on me in the pool which was not a very fun time)

My Great outfit

Me and Brenna being superheroes

Our towel capes

Jumping into the pool

Gosh darn it I'm already at my word limit!

Guess that's it for this post
Bye Felicia,
Maggie

Kylie.

Kylie. Farber.

My bae

Kylie didn't make it into my first post which just so happened to be about my team.  This is because Kylie wasn't even on the team yet.  But she is now sooooo...

By the way....

A history
Kylie was born on June 20th, 2002 in Utah. (does anybody actually care?)  Kylie used to be in the optional levels which pretty much means that she was REALLY good!  Unfortunately,  she broke her foot and couldn't do gymnastics for a year.  As you can imagine, Kylie lost a ton of skills from being away for so long.  When she came back, she joined the Xcel team.  (just so you know, Xcel Gold is about the equivalent of level 5/6).  So that's where we are now, months later, she's on the Gold team.

Funny Times
Here is a list of hilarious stories that have happened with Kylie.

1. One day, me and Kylie decided to race across the beams.  We were going to jump over each beam until we got to the end. Like this...
   

Anyways, we thought that we were GENIUS and that this would be great!! So we ran and started jumping over the beams. Kylie however, tripped over a beam and face planted into the ground...taking me with her.

2. One time (last weekend to be exact) the whole team was over at Kylie's house.  We were up in her room dancing and such (as girls do) and we noticed these boys were staring at us rather creepily (is that a word?) We watched them secretly and they went back to their house. But then, like 10 minutes later, they came back...with a cross bow.  They started hiking this mountain right behind Kylie's house.  We decided to follow them (and be spies). We got in all black clothes and started secretly hiking up the mountain behind them. At one point Brenna (in the back) whispers," Guys, guys...spy selfie" at that moment it was like the funniest thing ever because she was trying to hold out her phone and take a picture and Kylie was trying to push her down so she wouldn't give us away and she was like duck facing as she was trying to push her and it was one of the funniest things i've ever seen. Anyways the boys mysteriously disappeared and we ended up just hiking to the top of the mountain to watch the sun set. It was a good time.

Us being spies

Artsy Picture at the top of the mountain

So yeah! That's all you need to know about Kylie Farber. Did anybody actually read this entire post? That's all for now kids...
Bye Y'all

GTC Meet

Why hello there!

This weekend I had yet another competition! This one was in Lehi at a gym called GTC.  This is one of my teams favorite meets!

Our first event was beam, YIKES! Brenna went up first and I was second.

*side note*
Just so you are aware, this is the order the team always goes in at competitions:
Brenna
Maggie
Kylie
Tasia
It isn't in any particular order, we just like it that way.

Back to beam.  I went up after Brenna.  I stuck everything but my cartwheel and scored an 8.45. Beam wasn't our best, and you can't blame us because it was our first event of the competition.

Next was floor.  We waited, and waited, and waited, until finally it was our turn.  I walked onto the floor and did a great routine.  Except that I tripped over myself a little bit in one of my dance moves. I scored a 9.25 getting me first place!

After floor, we headed over to vault.  I had okay vaults, not my best. I scored a 8.85, third place.  The funniest thing happened at vault though.  When tasia was going, she hit the springboard and the moment her hands hit the table she made the funniest noise! She was like. "HUUUUUUHGGGGHHUH!" We were all laughing so hard!

Our last event was bars.
If you remember from my last post, my bars were not very good because I got a huge deduction for not having a vertical cast on high bar. But this time was different! My cast was great and I got an 8.9!

My scores!

Awards!
We waited FOOOOOORRRRRREEEEVVVEEEERRRR!! I'm not joking.  After bars we waited about half an hour for awards to start and then there was about an hour of awards before my age division.  But finally we started awards!
Vault: 3rd
Bars: 5th
Beam: 7th
Floor: 1st!!
AA: 3rd

In the team awards, our team placed 3rd which was really good considering there was like 14 teams there.  Kylie did really well and scored first place all around.

After the meet we (of course) went to noodles and company for some celebratory noodles!  It was super fun and we had a great time.  After noodles we had some cupcakes from Sweet Tooth Fairy!  The meet ran really late so basically we were eating dinner at around 10ish.

Overall this was a pretty good meet! Here are some pictures!

Waiting for Floor to start

Sideways, but whatevs

After awards

Back at noodles!

Kylie taking ugly snapchats.

That's all for this post, vote on my poll!

Maggie

P.S. My next meet is the winter classic which is not for a couple of weeks

Bailies Meet

EW

BAILIES


My team when we found out we were going to Bailies this year...

Creds: pix good

Just so you know, Literally every person on my team absolutely hates this meet.  We always do terrible at it and we just hate meet overall.

But this year, was different.  We all did very well at the meet and we were very happy with the turnout.

Our first event was vault. We had a great warm-ups and all four of us stuck our vaults and were fully satisfied with our scores.  I got a 9.025 which I was very happy with.  We were excited and nervous as we headed for bars.

Next was bars.  I was especially nervous for bars because I had been falling in my squat on in practice almost every time.  Warmups shook me up because I made exactly one squat on.  Brenna went before me and I was second.  I saluted the judges and turned to face the bars.  I stood on the springboard for what seemed like forever trying to get my nerves to calm down.  I kipped up, stooped my feet onto the bar and jumped. I made it!!! I nailed my routine and stuck the landing. Unfortunately, the judges thought otherwise.  I scored an 8.25. Everybody was shocked and my coach ran to the judges to investigate! The judges were stubborn poops who wouldn't change my score which kinda sucked.

Next was Beam.  We took our grips off and immediately started beam warmups.  Brenna warmed up first, she fell in every single skill she did.  I warmed up next, I fell about 4 times.  This was making us nervous.  Brenna got up and did an ok routine with 2 falls.  I went up next, I stuck every skill except for my stupid cartwheel. 8.625.  After me, Kylie went up.  She fell in her full turn, and fell flat on her face in her dismount.  Tasia got up and nailed her routine. Beam overall was pretty bad for the team.  We had to shake off beam because we still had one more event left.

Last was floor, my fave.  I messed up on some of my dance moves at the beginning, but overall I did a fabulous routine.  I stuck my roundoff back handspring back tuck and my front tuck.  I got a 9.150.

Awards was the best! Kylie, Brenna and Tasia were all competing in the same age division, and I was in a different one.  Kylie rounded up 4 gold medals including one for all around! My scores were...
Vault: 1st
Bars: 6th
Beam: 3rd
Floor: 1st
AA: 3rd

Me on first place!

But the best thing by far was that our team won First Place in team awards!! This meet was by far better than the last and we were all satisfied with our awards! We celebrated by going to Noodles and Company to continue our tradition.

Here are some pictures:

Team Photo Before Bars

The Trophy!!

All our medals

Celebratory Noodles

My Medals

Some Swaggin Videos

Ok so I kinda like to make video edits of me and my friends doing gymnastics and I thought I would show you them...

1. My Birthday
So fun story.  All of the clips from this were taken on my birthday.  Shortly after filming on beam, I injured myself.  What sucks though is that we didn't get it on film.  So basically I was in the hospital on my birthday...aaaannnywho, here's the video...

2. The Cow
This video was taken a couple of days before Halloween.  I made a cow costume for Halloween last year. I was originally going to write a post about Halloween and put this video at the end...but that post never really happened.  I laugh every time I watch this because it's such a swaggy video, but i'm in a cow suit sooooo...

3. Me and Kylie
Once upon a Saturday, me and Kylie were bored.  We decided to go outside and try to take some artsy gymnastics pictures.  We ended up taking slow motion videos so that it would be easier to pause them and screen shot them.  We had a bunch of slow motion videos on my phone so we decided to make a movie with them, this was the result...

4. Back Tuck
This video was taken on the same night that me and Kylie took our clips for the previous video, this is just a video of Kylie doing a back tuck that I edited really cool. I love the background of this because the sun was setting and the sky looked orange and cool! Enjoy...

5. Bruh
This video was taken a long time ago.  It was taken on the very first day I'm going to do a back tuck (so a while ago).  At the time it was like the coolest thing ever for me and I was really excited so I had Tasia film it for me. Later, I added some music and slowed it down a little, here is the result….
(BTW if you were wondering why I called it "BRUH" it's because I posted it on Vine one time and I have no idea what to caption it so that's what I did...)

6. Bars Dismount
This video was taken the day I tried this really fun and weird dismount on bars.  I filmed my whole routine but I just decided to edit and add music to my dismount.  So here is the video...

That's all for this blog post. I hope you enjoyed watching these because some of them took me a long time to edit.  I will probably do another one of these posts in the future when I make more videos, but for now I only have 6. Ok byeeeee

Maggie

22 Hours of Gymnastics Later...

So you would think that over holiday break we would get a break from gymnastics...think again.  Over holiday break they pretty much doubled our practice hours. We had practice every day over break except for Christmas Eve and Christmas.

Our workout schedule was like this...
Monday, December 22nd:  1-3:30
Tuesday, December 23rd: 5-7:30
Friday, December 26th: 9 am - 2 pm
Monday, December 29th: 2-5
Tuesday, December 30th: 2-5
Wednesday, December 31st: 9am-2pm

The days that were 6 hours each were called "gymnastics camp" these were the days that we got the most work done.  All of the levels came to the gym and we rotated through events and coaches. This was nice because we got to get corrections from new coaches that we had never been coached by before.  On these days we also got to work new skills and take a break from the same old routines.  Kylie got a new beam dismount, a round off back tuck off the end...I was too scared to try it.  I worked on fly-aways on bars.  A fly-away is where you are swinging on the high bar and you let go and flip once before you land. Like this...

Creds: gymnastics coaching

On most of the days during break, Kylie and I got to work in with the level 5 and 6 girls since that's about the level we are.  It was really fun to train with some new girls and make new friends.  One of the girls we met, Taylor, was from Ohio and was staying in Park City and training in our gym over winter break!  She told us that at her gym in Ohio, they had 4...yes 4 floors, 15 beams, 6 sets of bars, and like 5 vault runways!

Our last day of Gymnastics camp was on New Years Eve, it was another 6 hour practice. I was the only one there from our team. I worked with the level 5 and 6's again. This time was a little different, because we worked less on Beam, Bars, Floor, and Vault, and more on tramp, tumble track, and rod floor.  This was fun because tumbling is my favorite! I got my tumbling to be more powerful and I even attempted some layouts. (key word being "attempted".)

It wasn't JUST tumbling on the last day...because if you've ever tried to do backflips and twists for 6 hours straight...it doesn't end well.  We worked on bars and vault a little.  Here is a video of me working bars...(no fly-away :( )

So I guess that's all! But I'm not at my word limit yet so let's talk some more!  I am having a meet this weekend in draper...BAILIES. *dun dun duuuuun*. We all hate the Bailies meet, so prepare for a rant when I post about it.  Literally last year at that meet:

• I got a 7.8 on floor (my best event)
• Brenna completely forgot her beam routine
• They registered Cody in the wrong age division.
• They didn't even register me!!

Ok byeeeeee.

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

Beam, Bars, Floor, Vault

The events...pretty much what makes up Gymnastics.  I'm just gonna give you a brief description of all of the events because...yolo.

Here's a picture I drew you of the events.

Vault.   Here's how it goes down.  You run as fast as you can, jump on a springy thing, put your hands on a big table thing,  do a couple of flips, and land (hopefully). Here is a gif to help your brain.

Courtesy of: The Wire

Beam.  *shiver goes down my spine*.  So if you are good at doing backflips, on a four inch piece of wood, four feet off the ground, then beam is for you!! Unfortunately, I am not good at doing backflips, on a four inch piece of wood, four feet off the ground. And mostly it's because i'm afraid of this...

Courtesy of: Gif Shot

Here is a picture of me falling off the beam...

#acurate

So to sum it up...I HATE BEAM!!

Bars.  Bars is a pretty fun event.  I personally think that it is the most difficult event because it requires a HUGE amount of strength.  One of the first skills you learn on bars is the Kip. A kip is that swingy thing that all gymnasts do when the start their bar routines...i'll just show you.

Courtesy of: Wikia

Anyway, it is like, a HUGE deal when a gymnast gets their first kip. It personally only took me about a month to get my Kip, but it was still like the coolest thing ever when I could finally do it. So enough about kips, bars is a cool event.

Floor.  Floor is pretty chill, everybody likes floor.  I think that it is the least nerve racking event, but the most dangerous event, because of the extreme tumbling combinations.  Floor is mostly jumping around and doing flips on a floor that is a little more bouncy than normal.  Floor is my strongest event because I have tons of power and I'm not afraid to try new tumbling skills.

Here is what floor looks like...

Soooooo...yeah! That's a basic rundown of all of the events in gymnastics!

Bye,

Maggie