A summertime New England beach is luxurious, but New England winters can be harsh and unforgiving. It was an hour’s drive from my father’s house to my high school, and my little gray car didn’t have heat. I didn’t have enough money to fix it since all of my cash went into body piercing and gas. I passed through each town with a sheet of ice on the windshield and would sometimes stick my head out the window to better see where I was going. The ocean air was freezing, and I didn’t have gloves so I wore socks on my hands. I couldn’t imagine what that must have looked like to the morning commuters: a boy covered in steel driving a block of ice with socks on his hands.
I was happier living at my dad’s house, and his girlfriend tried to ease my pain with her kindness, but the drives to school and gymnastics were killing me. I was beyond exhausted, and would fall asleep at the wheel. I don’t know how I didn’t crash my car. I think on those long nights something powerful and caring took hold of the wheel. I started smoking cigarettes to keep me awake in case my angels didn’t show up. Before I finished a cigarette, I would take two inhalations of my asthma medication because of how badly the smoke hurt my lungs. I drove those long hours into the night with smoke in my lungs, anger in my heart, and the sea by my side.
LURKING WITHIN A VICTIM’S OWN GENETIC CODE, A VILLAINOUS DISEASE CALLED fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva IS ABLE TO CONVERT MUSCLES, TENDONS, LIGAMENTS, AND OTHER CONNECTIVE TISSUE INTO BONE, FUSING INTO A TYPE OF EXOSKELETON THAT CAN TRANSFORM A HUMAN BEING INTO A LIVING STATUE.
As I watched my past roll out to sea, a falling star dropped into the empty space over the horizon. The ocean reflected the night sky like a huge liquid mirror. I sat on the soft sand and knew deep within my bones that my dream had not yet turned to stone, that behind my fury and hysteria, I still had the desire to compete. Together with the sea and the moon, I decided to continue to try my best in gymnastics.
Despite all my body modifications, I was in the best shape of my life. I trained every day—stretching, lifting, and performing routines better than ever. My grades and SAT scores, on the other hand, were not doing as well. I needed to bulk up my senior year average in order to continue my education and gymnastics. I needed to get noticed by college-level coaches, which made my senior year a very important one.
Once I would get into a good college, I hoped to turn my education around. I had stopped drinking and smoking pot, and increased the intensity of each workout. I had accepted that my Olympic dream would not happen; the best I could aim for now was to compete at a good college. Although I admitted this truth to myself, I still hadn’t accepted that I had fallen so far behind. To be an Olympian remained my secret aspiration, even if it was submerged in a sea of regret.
The Junior Olympic National Championship was being held in Oakland, and I wanted to go for more than one reason. California, in my mind, was a wonderful land of palm trees and hope, the complete opposite of the dreary seasons of New England. I secretly planned to run away after the competition and stay in California to start my life over again.
Although I felt like I was spiritually drowning, the warrior in me made a pact to rise up from the ocean floor for one more fight. I strategized and obsessed and focused on the perfect execution of skills, solidifying every bent knee and pointed toe. Gymnastics competition is a science of safety and numbers. We had to do our routines hundreds of times exactly the same way, error-free, but more importantly, we had to be perfect on the day of the competition. What we did in practice ultimately didn’t count. I ran through my routines in my mind every night against the throes of insomnia. Those routines were my flesh and blood, my children, and I mentally and physically knew every inch of them. Even sleep allowed me no rest, as my muscles twitched and my body perspired, executing harrowing skills instead of having sweet dreams.
Gymnasts all over the country were preparing for their state championships. We were strong, dedicated athletes used to extraordinary amounts of pain. Every day we woke up with incredible amounts of soreness. We murdered our bodies, and the apparatuses we used gave us horrible beatings. It’s an odd relationship between the gymnast and the structures we flip on, swing around, and hang from. Anyone with a love or respect for his or her body would not endure the slow re-formation, or the bone-bashing and joint-jarring challenges gymnasts place upon themselves in their obsession to achieve greatness. But the deep love and bizarre devotion kept us flipping on fire as our ligaments, joints, and muscles ripped and stretched. Years of pursuing this agonizing relationship had hardened our bodies and conditioned our minds to transcend normal pain.
Each apparatus was unique as it doled out its own punishment. Our knees and ankles were destroyed after endless punching of the floor, sending crunching pangs of agony through our bones. We pointed our toes and tightened our legs to extremes. The pommel horse never appeared dangerous, but it was a hard, leather-covered beast, and hitting it wrong was like getting punched by a prizefighter. The leather covering the horse sometimes ripped the top layer of our skin, like the bite of its namesake. Swinging from the still rings stretched our shoulders to their fullest point of flexibility, until it felt like our ligaments and tendons would pull out of their sockets.
The worst discomfort for me was the high bar. It took years of training to strengthen the muscles in my forearms to hang from the bar, and then the constant friction between the steel bar, chalk, and leather grip tore the skin off my palms. We called these deep, bloody, flesh tears “rips.” Even with multiple rips, we still had to perform. A drop of water on the torn flesh stung like rubbing alcohol poured on a wound. Rips made everything unbearable—showering, opening doors, holding a pen. When we slept, the raw meat of our hands pulsed in pain, like skin on fire, as if pain found its birth in our open wounds.
But, for us gymnasts, this was our love and we wouldn’t have it any other way. We begged for the glory to battle against gravity through the extreme movements of man. Our obsession, desire, loyalty, and discipline overshadowed any treacherous notions of quitting this beautiful sport. We were protected and possessed by the unspoken power of gymnastics. We wanted to be warriors, and in many ways, we were. If we weren’t going to be great, what would we do? What kind of future would we have after years of dedication to the sport? Our bodies were broken and whipped into the human machine gymnastics demanded.
For the true gymnast, physical pain becomes as natural as the tortured breathing I experience during an acute asthma attack. We get used to it, hate it, love it, sleep with it, and absorb it into our beings. But if we tired of the agony, or hated the never-ending endurance testing, or couldn’t wait for the war to be over, it was never spoken. Those things go beyond the sport of gymnastics, and every athlete feels a deep passion to push through the affliction of injury. I often wondered if my desire to win was worth the mutilation and destruction of my body.
I won the state competition, and it meant everything to me because Coach Dan was there to see me take the first-place medal. I was still embarrassed competing in front of him, because I knew in my heart I could have done better. I knew I could have been a true champion, and now I was only a suggestion of that, a mere shadow of what I could have been.
The next level was regional competitions, consisting of all New England states. Chris and I were constantly neck and neck, and I was afraid he would win this one. He was much stronger than me, and resembled a body builder more than a gymnast. He also worked harder, but I felt I had more passion and had sacrificed more. I think my coach was eager to watch the story unfold, to see which one of us would win at that level.
During warm-up for our third event, Chris injured his ankle coming off the vault. He had to withdraw from the competition, ensuring we would never know who the better gymnast was. I won that regional championship, but it never felt like it was a true fight, both because Chris could not compete against me and because I had held back on some skills I would have tried in an effort to highlight my strengths.