The Struggle of Letting Go

This week, I spent time trying to let go. When something is so pervasive in your life that it is your life, you don’t even notice how many layers of it you need to release to become a person who exists without it again.

For me, gymnastics feels like this—not just the sport of gymnastics, but the art of it.

The art of gymnastics is the flipping, the spinning, the walking on your hands. I love that part. I always have. The sport of gymnastics, though—the way it’s run, the way it operates—that part I fucking hate. But learning to separate the two has been a lifelong journey.

Sorting Through the Past

I went through a memory box filled with trophies, medals, and mementos from gymnastics. There was a teddy bear from a competition, dressed in the same leotard I wore that day. A bag from my mom’s gymnastics business—she had been at every competition with me, first as my biggest supporter, then as a business owner standing on the sidelines.

I found tangled-up medals that once meant everything to me. At one point, each medal represented the time, effort, and sacrifices I had poured into the sport. Some of them reminded me of things I was grateful for. But they also represented the greatest betrayal of my life, the deepest sadness, and the thing to which I had dedicated myself more than anything else.

In a photo I took of this moment, I chose three pieces of gymnastics memorabilia to keep. The rest, I let go of. 

A trophy from 1990. I remember competing at age 6 and being so afraid of failing that I intentionally fell off beam on a turn. I basically jumped off. I recall thinking, ‘whew. I fell. Now I can’t make a mistake’. At age 6, I already feared failure more than anything.

I also saved two medals. One from a competition in Chicago and one from Arizona. Both in the year 2000 and significant competitions in my life. These three items are all that is left of my lifetime in the sport.

Does This Bring Me Joy?

As I sorted through broken trophies and fractured memories, moving them into a new box, my friend—who had offered to help me dismantle the storage space in my basement—asked why I was keeping them.

“I guess for sentimental value,” I said.

She paused, then asked, Does this feel sentimental to you? Or like…

I finished her sentence: “Traumatizing? Upsetting? Frustrating? Infuriating? Homicidal. Fuck my….”

She stopped me. “Maybe these aren’t items of sentimental value. You seem less sentimentally….and more stabby….?”

I did feel stabby. Odd. I thought I loved this teddy bear with my matching leotard on it. These trophies. All that work. Did I love it?

So, we did the exercise where you ask yourself if something brings you joy. When I looked at my old medals, trophies, even the gold of the gold medals, I felt nothing. I felt empty. A space in my psyche where emotion should be—but wasn’t.

Gymnastics created that emptiness.

The Reality of Gymnastics

Over the past little while, I’ve tried to find the positives in gymnastics. It may seem easy to say that it was a wonderful sport to be part of, but ask any gymnast who spends 30 to 40 hours a week in the gym if they’re having fun.  And they’ll say yes! Despite the bloody rips on their hands, a sore everything, unnoticed stress fractures and extreme exhaustion. They’ll lie to you and themselves. Because they’re brainwashed to. I was and at a point, I couldn’t quit. It was my entire identity. Losing gymnastics would be losing my life.

Do you like this?

If you worked your full-time job and then added another 30 to 40 hours of training on top of it, you wouldn’t be a happy person either. But we do this to children.

I loved gymnastics. More than I can describe. I wasn’t the kid whose parents had to say, Come on, Nadia, let’s go—you have practice. I wasn’t the kid whose coaches had to sit down with my parents to tell them I wasn’t working hard enough. The only way I can describe it is that I was absolutely obsessed with gymnastics from before I had conscious memories.

Chicago: The Vault That Changed Everything

When I competed in Chicago and won vault, something happened that day that changed the trajectory of my future.

Our vault runway at my gym in the U.S., Marvateens, was set up differently than in competition. In training, we landed on a soft pit mat, which felt completely different from a competition landing. Our coaches didn’t pile mats very high, so the landings were almost bouncy—a giant slab of foam was there to land on. 

Sometimes, we didn’t put any mats over the foam so that the vault was a wide open airspace to launch through, twist and flip and land happily on your back, face, stomach, roll out of it, run out of it or even slam into the OTHER large piece of foam against the wall. It was like a back catcher.

Changing the Landing

Right before the Chicago meet, our coaches added a harder mat on top of the pit mat so we could practice landing with more impact. It was still softer than competition, but less forgiving than usual.

I was nervous about this vault. It was a backward flipping vault, and I knew that if I under-rotated, I’d land on my face. Or worse, I would crunch my ankles into itty bitty pieces if I got my feet underneath me but landed severely under rotated. Crunch! 

That thought alone was enough to make me pull as hard as I could—to rotate as fast as possible. I didn’t care if I over-rotated, took a step back, or even had to roll out of it. Anything was better than eating the mat.

On my first vault, I pulled too hard. I over-rotated and took a big step backward. Not perfect, but fine. I wasn’t happy with it because I didn’t stick my landing. Failure. My coach said nothing as I walked back toward the end of the runway, contemplating what tweaks I should make to the vault so it would be better. Perfect.

For my second vault, I made a split-second decision. I wanted to stick it. So this time, I loosened my grip on my legs mid-air to slow my rotation just slightly. I still went as hard as I could until I hit the air, then the adjustment was ever so minute that it would be imperceptible. I felt every moment of it as if it was slow motion.

I landed perfectly. Stuck it without a step or wiggle. Gold medal.

It was the best vault I had ever done.

Capital Cup: The Vault That Ended It All

Months later, at Capital Cup in Washington, D.C., I was competing the same vault.

But I was injured.

I had stress fractures in my shin, but I was still competing because that’s what gymnasts do. It’s easy – we just rename the injury. Stress fractures in your shin are renamed as shin splints. Then it becomes an irritation, not an injury. I renamed many broken bones as irritants. It did not serve me well later in life, however, as a gymnast being extremely tough and blocking out pain was advantageous.

Touch Warm Up

I did my touch warm up on vault, which is a single vault to remind you how to do your vault. If you want, you can throw your hardest skill; sometimes, it is more advantageous to do a timer and then only throw the skill when competing. That’s what I did.

I did my first vault, my warm up vault, and threw a timer. That meant I didn’t do my full rotation in a pike. I tucked my knees and flew off the vault, practicing rotating and landing on the very hard surface below. Nothing like our training; this landing felt like cement.

My coach was near the vault watching multiple athletes on multiple events. At this level, it was common to have your coach nearby, however, they didn’t say very much in terms of correction. We were trained, it was not the gym and my coach said very few words during competition. All the work was done in the gym.

I walked back to the end of the runway, limping. Our team trainer said to me “you’re limping, come over and let me see your ankle”. I said I was fine. He already knew I had fractures in my ankle, therefore, he was watching closely to ensure we didn’t get injured throwing our hardest skills. 

He said, “Nadia. You’re limping, you shouldn’t do this. Come over here so I can tape it at least”.

I didn’t even turn my head toward him when I said, “No.“

Adjusting Imperfectly

I made the same decision I made in Chicago—to slow my rotation down slightly to stick the landing.

What I didn’t realize was that I wasn’t going as fast as I had in Chicago. In retrospect, I felt myself running slower and hitting the back of the vault. I was not rotating and had come in at a different angle due to my slow run. I should have accommodated for that and pulled harder; instead, I remembered Chicago and automatically tried the same approach.

The first thing to hit the ground was my head.

I was in a piked position, body folded in half, pulling hard as I realized mid-air that the ground was very close. My legs were straight, feet flexed, trying to slip underneath me at the last second. I barely managed to get one foot under me, and that single foot probably saved my life—but it also tore a tendon and shattered my heel as the tendon tore off of it.

I never competed again. I had surgery to repair the tendon, I had my heel bone scraped down to remove the shattered, egg-shell like bone from my talus. 

More stress fractures unnoticed that had blasted apart upon landing. Naturally, the leg I pulled under me was my ‘good’ and none irritated leg. That left me with a completely destroyed right ankle, and a fractured left shin called shin splints that I never did anything about.

The Fine Line Between Victory and Disaster

I didn’t even get to compete on bars, the one event I had been looking forward to. I went to beam next, unable to walk, in excruciating pain. Our team trainer taped my ankle up, trying to get me through to bars, but even air moving against my foot was too much.

We tried taking out my mount, making my dismount easier and theoretically, that may have worked. I had a number of release skills in my routine, where I fly off the bar and catch it again. If I had missed one, just one of those skills, I would have had no way of safely landing without my legs. I couldn’t miss. It was too risky.

It took months to diagnose the extent of the damage because it didn’t show up on an x-ray. By the time they figured it out, the torn tendon had calcified and hardened. I had continued training on it without knowing. It felt as if my foot was not attached to my leg, however, it didn’t hurt. I just ran carefully so I didn’t trip and eat the mat from running on my ghost foot.

That one decision—to slow my rotation without considering my loss of power—was the end of my gymnastics career.

Victory and complete disaster share a very fine line.

One Let Go At a Time

I started gymnastics at age two. I competed from age six to 17. Then I coached for over a decade before my sexual assault and battery legal battle began. Gymnastics was my life until I was 40, when the eight year legal battle ended and I began to say goodbye to the sport of gymnastics. 

To the sport – but never the art.

Gymnastics is a hard and grueling sport. Flying and flipping is amazing. I love it today and will forever. 

I love the art; I let go of the sport. Or at least, I try. The art lives in me forever.