Ann

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you will probably want to know is how it all happened. How it all started in the first place, but I don’t really feel like going into all that right now. To tell the truth it bores me because I've already gone through how it started about 50 times in my head. It all happened when I was 10. Believe it or not, I was a great gymnast and I could do flips, turns and all that fancy crap. Competing against other gymnasts and winning was what I lived for. During that time I was a level four gymnast and I was pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. I think my coaches thought this too because after a big meet they wanted me too skip level five and go straight to level six. When I was told this, my coach, Ann, smiled at me like I was some silly girl that didn’t know anything. She treated us all like that, my teammates and I. Just because we were little doesn’t mean we didn’t have any clue as to what was going on. Ann was our conditioning coach and she made us work our little butts off. When we were all complaining after a workout, she always said "If you want to be better, you have to get stronger." Sympathy was not a word in her vocabulary and although I loved gymnastics and liked to be pushed hard, she went a little to far overboard.


Ann now had an excuse to train me even harder because she could train me for level five and level six. I was now at the gym almost 25 hours a week… that’s when the pain started coming. At first I didn’t tell anyone because I was afraid I would be considered a wimp. After a while though, I couldn't take it anymore, I went to my mom (who is a doctor) and told her about it. Without much empathy, she got me a boot from the hospital that I could work out in. I wore the ugly blue and white ankle support one day to gym. Ann came running up to me telling me to take it off. Supposedly it was going to disrupt my balance on the beam or something. I replied with a hint of annoyance that my mother had gotten it for me and it helped. Of course her picky, tough little mind did not care that my ankle was hurting, and she insisted with a red face, that I could only wear it if some fancy ankle doctor had prescribed it. Now maybe I haven’t described this 20-year-old lady very well. She was a pretty, blond, petit, muscular woman, who could scare the hell out of anyone! With her dazzling smile she could pull on the charm when she needed to, for the other coaches and our parents, but when she got us alone I swear, you could see her eyes roll back and her head spin around as if she was the devil incarnate. Well, not really, but you know what I mean.

Two weeks later, after working like crazy with an agonizingly painful ankle, I knew something was up. Ann was crazy, like I said, and wouldn't give me a break even after I insisted that one was necessary about eight billion times. In a way I respected her, mainly because anyone who didn’t would be sorry. So my teammates and I did whatever she said to do, making faces at her scary back whenever we thought she couldn't see us.

A month went by and my ankle wasn’t getting any better, and Ann was getting tougher. I stood up to her one day, and surprisingly she relented, saying," Ok, you can rest your ankle." I was all happy until she added the unexpected twist, "by working out the same on the trampoline." For weeks I went to work out with unsteady footing, making my ankle strain even harder. Eventually I would come home crying after practice because of the pain. One day my mom took me to the doctor to see what was up. The doctor pronounced that I had Achilles tendonitis; I had pulled the main tendon (Achilles tendon) in my ankle. The worst part was it would not heal until I wore an annoyingly large, cumbersome black boot for quite some time.

As I was driven to my next practice, my mother told me to take it easy and just watch practices for at least a month. I could just see the look on Ann's face, scowling at me uttering, "Take that boot off! You wont be able to flip with it on." The actual event of confronting her, with boot, went something very similar to what I had anticipated. Even after given the doctors note, she still wanted me to keep on going but "a little lighter, so my ankle could rest. " Well, you would think oh, that’s great, she gets to rest but no, a rest for Ann was making up for what I couldn't do with my legs, squats, jumps, flips, and all, by working out my upper body. My thoughts wandered during the lecture she was giving me about a new workout schedule. I saw fellow gym mates flipping and tumbling all around me, some getting scolded while other coaches excitedly announced that their pupils event had been great, perfect even. Randomly jumping back into reality, registering who was speaking to me, a realization spread over me. Looking into her piercing influential eyes, I decided it wasn’t worth it. I figured out that just because she was older than me, and extremely scary, I didn’t need to put my self through any more stress, and I shouldn't risk injuring myself permanently.

The day I decided to tell Ann, I was a mess! I didn’t want to let her down, but I knew I had to quit, or at least take a break so my ankle could recover. Our green Suburban pulled to a halt outside the back entrance of the gym. I went in first to tell Ann, and my mom was going to come in later to "back me up." I raced into the gym, so I could just get it over with. As I ran across the smelly blue carpet with my awkward boot, I tripped on the bowl of chalk dust used for grip on the uneven bars. Chalk whipped by my feet, falling like snow, turning a section of the dark blue carpet the color of a baby boy's blanket. I hit the floor with a bang. When I looked up a scary figure was standing over me, a scowl on her face. I stood up shaking, thinking, "Oh great, now she's mad."

Standing up to Ann was a big event in my not so horrible life. My ankle healed after a month or so and I went back to gymnastics for a while. Through all of this, I learned that it is always better to trust myself, my own instincts, and not just follow whatever someone tells met to do. Ann was surprisingly understanding that day and now I know a lot more about who I am. I am stronger for the experience and can stick up for myself, even against crazy grownups who think they know everything.

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