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Snap, Crackle, Pop! courtesy of gymclip.com
The sound of bone scraping bone is excruciating; it is all at once long nails on a chalkboard, a child skinning his knee after slipping on loose, pointy gravel and the scritch-scratch of a mechanical pencil’s furious scribbling. The feel of bone on bone, well, is the sensation of piercing, cutting shards trying to escape from the prison that is your body. The pain doesn’t go away; it only recedes from time to time. And forget ever being “back to normal.”
They don’t tell you this when you sign up for gymnastics class. They show you posters of the history-making 1996 Olympic gold-medal winning “Magnificent Seven” gymnastics team. They show you shiny leotards and even shinier medals. Parents of energetic 11-year-olds don’t stand a chance of even starting to form the word, “No.”
Fast-forward ten years, and I have experienced the extreme highs and extreme lows of the sport of gymnastics. I have been a state champion, and I have fallen off the beam at Nationals. I’ve done back flips on ESPN, and I’ve glared into the deep abyss of eating disorders. And I have broken, fractured, torn, sprained, strained, concussed and bruised almost every muscle or bone in my body.
A week before my Sweet Sixteen bash, I dismounted off the balance beam in my first competition at a higher level. Instead of bending my knee to absorb the shock, my knee bent upwards, toward my face—or at least that’s what it felt like—hyperextended, and broke. A piece of bone had cracked off inside my knee in addition to a torn MCL.
To this day, my knee won’t fully straighten. It aches right before a rainstorm, and really hates my black stilettos. And all I care about is the five tenths I got taken off my score, that February day, five years ago.
My last year of high school gymnastics brought on a new level of pain. My back felt as if a spike was being jammed through it every time I landed. My coaches dismissed it as minor; after all, I was the captain, and leaders work through it.
After my first trip to the emergency room during my freshman year of college gymnastics, doctors speculated I had stress fractures—tiny breaks in key parts of my vertebrae. After the fourth trip, which occurred last semester, doctors discovered two of my lower vertebrae had, in effect, fused together. The discs and liquid separating the vertebrae had dried up, leaving nothing but bone grating on bone, and me on a ridiculous amount of intravenous narcotic painkillers. A 21-year-old's back shouldn't be described in this way, but a 21-year-old gymnast is already defying the norm. In gymnastics years, 21 is 81.
I am currently in the last year of my gymnastics career, competing for the University of Maryland club team, and it is bittersweet. Twenty-one in gymnastics years is like twenty-one in dog years—over-the-hill. Couple old age with a once-broken knee and a back that requires consistent emergency room visits, and people always ask the same question: Why do you do it?
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Me vaulting at 2006 Nationals in Oakland, CA |
It is the number one cliché in the athlete handbook: for love of sport. Once you’ve spent afternoons covered in chalk for your bar routine, Friday nights in the car, missing football games, to compete at away meets and sunny June days in airplanes for the privilege of competing on the national stage, its hard to just say goodbye.
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Maryland Club Gymnastics Team at 2006 Nationals |
Being in the twilight of my career has shown me I’m not ready to leave, not ready to accept the reality of quitting athletics. This is partly why I am an aspiring sports broadcast journalist. I want to branch out and cover all aspects of all sports. Sports are more than just a box score. They’re a microcosm of societal issues: race, background, skill competition, teamwork, selfishness, victory, defeat, success, failure and determination.
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| Maryland team at the awards banquet after placing 6th out of 50 teams! From left: Juliet Han, Erin Kalish, Nicole Porcaro, Jillian Lipton, Debbie Williams, Kate Ohlmacher, Casey Deak, Kim yates, Amanda Dacey, Christie Staso Photo courtesy of Nicole Porcaro |
I’ve written on women’s basketball and done color commentary for women’s volleyball. I live and breathe baseball, inhale it as if it were air in short supply—I can never get enough. Sports journalism, though tough, is my calling, and the setbacks and victories I have experienced during my sports career give me a solid frame of reference to draw upon. Because once you survive and excel at gymnastics, you can survive and excel at anything. My muscles shriek in agony as I mount the beam. Flipping, twirling, flying, leaping....crashing, just to reach my last Nationals competition ever.
The next morning, I reach for the ice pack and the Ben-Gay. It's going to be a long semester.
Copyright © 2006 Nicole Porcaro