There's nothing like a good yoga warm-up, especially when your body tends to be as old and creaky as mine occasionally is*. Feeling your joints settle into more comfortable positions, letting your body tell you which way it needs to move and stretch, feeling muscles relax...it's a good thing.

More Stuff from Home

One of my tasks while home was to start archiving all the videos my parents made of my various gymnastics competitions. I'm really glad we have them, but watching them at this point is a little weird, a little like watching a stranger. Also, I forget just how tiny I was. I mean, I remember that there was a long stretch of time when I was barely over four feet tall, and that people were constantly commenting about how little I was and picking me to demonstrate my tininess, but I never felt that small. But there's this moment in one of the videos, when my coach hugs me after a routine, and he's on his knees and he's about the same size as me on my feet.

It was also especially interesting to watch my interactions with my coaches, because I remember just how intense and sometimes complicated our relationships and my feelings for them were. I mean, these were men** whom I absolutely, literally, trusted with my life...and with whom I often spent more time than with my own family. And of course gymnastics is an intense and often frightening sport, so my relationship with these men also ties in with this whole comforting thing that we unearthed in therapy just before Christmas...I'll have to think about this some more...

*people who know me give me a hard time whenever I say this, because I'm technically very young, but 14 years of competitive gymnastics has a tendency to age certain parts of your body faster than straight chronology would imply.
**my coaches were predominantly male for mostly physiological reasons - even as tiny as most gymnasts are, once they build up speed and start flying through the air, they generate more force than the average woman can harness.