Off Balance: A Memoir (29 page)

It took eight more months of flying back and forth between Cleveland and Houston until I took the leap and moved to Cleveland to be with Mike as he continued in medical school. My parents were not happy that I was leaving, especially to “chase a boy,” without being formally engaged, but I knew in my heart it was right.

Tata and I had been slowly rebuilding our relationship. There was never a moment when he or I formally apologized for any of the things that had gone on between us. It was more that the fighting and rehashing of the past had died down and we began to realize it was pointless to argue when we both still felt we were in the right. We learned to accept each other for who we were and move forward little by little.

Mike came to Houston to meet my family during Christmas 2001, five months before I moved to Cleveland. I really wasn’t sure how Tata would react to Mike. Despite the improved condition of our own relationship, he was always a tough critic when it came to my friends or anyone I’d shown interest in dating the past two years. I couldn’t imagine him ever “approving” of someone I wanted to follow to another state. Tata grilled him with what seemed like hundreds of questions, and Mike calmly and respectfully answered each one and was able to win Tata over in the course of the conversation. I remember Tata even asking Mike what he knew about goat cheese, of all things.

“How much a pound?” Tata asked.

“I don’t know, Mr. Moceanu, I just eat it,” Mike replied with a smile.

Tata laughed and really got a kick out of Mike, which was a huge relief. I knew Mike was “the one” and nobody was going to convince me otherwise, but having Mama and Tata approve of him certainly instantly made my life easier. It also provided me with hope as we moved into this next stage.

In May 2002, I stuffed my Ford Explorer with my personal belongings and set off on my 21-hour trek to Cleveland. In contrast to the last time I had left Texas, Tata was warmly supportive, even helpful. He even generously offered to bring my furniture and larger items in a moving truck a few weeks later. I was thankful for his blessing and support. Mama was supportive as well but reluctant to let me go in the end because of the distance. I promised I would return home often and be in regular touch.

Mike opened a door for me to work as a coach at Gymnastics World (GW), a gym where he had trained since he was a junior in high school. GW owners Ron and Joan Ganim welcomed me with open arms and have continued to be an extended family in Cleveland to this day. While I coached, I also attended Cuyahoga Community College and John Carroll University, to complete my business degree.

Mike remained passionate about gymnastics and even after he retired from competition, he stayed competitive by participating in the annual Ohio State University Alumni gymnastics performance each January, despite his heavy course load as a full-time medical student. It was inspirational to watch Mike deftly balance his various commitments. I also admired how he was so disciplined about getting to the gym to train. He used the January performances as a personal goal to keep in shape and stay involved in gymnastics while he navigated through medical school, residency, and beyond. Precision conditioning for our sport is demanding, and most gymnasts I know are unable to perform at an Elite level even
one
year after retirement, yet Mike was continuing to wow audiences years and years after he’d retired. He has actually earned quite a reputation at Ohio State for his impressive Alumni performances. I have never known anyone who loves gymnastics as much as Mike does, from the inside out. January 2012 marked his 17th consecutive alumni performance.

In 2004, I was spending a lot of time in the gym training for a post-Olympic tour and Mike started making comments about me getting back into competitive gymnastics.

“You should train again. You could do it,” he’d say.

His words intimidated me at first. I wasn’t sure that I could do it, or that I had it in me to push myself through the mental and physical aspects of training again, but he had me thinking. I had often felt my retirement was premature, and leaving the sport because of injury had felt like I didn’t leave Elite competitive gymnastics on my own terms. My heart still ached when I watched others perform. I definitely missed performing competitively. There were so many things that could have been done differently, and I certainly was intrigued by the thought of competing on my own terms. Mike was consistently encouraging and wanted to help me feel fulfilled with my gymnastics career, so slowly but surely I started training more seriously. By 2005, I was in full-blown training mode. However, this time, we followed Mike’s strategy to “train smarter, not harder,” so we could preserve my body and limit injury. I felt strong and motivated and trusted Mike’s approach, but it was at first a challenge for me to change the mind-set that had been hammered into me all those years. For most of my career, I was conditioned to believe I had to be in the gym forty-plus hours each week and that I couldn’t miss more than one day a week to perform at my best. Mike helped deprogram those notions and showed me that this smarter approach was just as effective. I trained a few hours every day, went to college full-time, and coached young gymnasts at GW part-time three days a week. I was taking on a lot, but I felt balanced, empowered, and determined. I’d always loved gymnastics, but for the first time I felt like I was doing it for
me
.

With Mike’s guidance, I decided to become a “specialist,” meaning that I would focus on two events only—vault and floor exercise—as opposed to training for the All-Around like I’d always
done in the past. I was learning new skills and it was challenging, but very exciting, too. I was enthusiastic to train, so even when Mike wasn’t able to meet me at the gym, I would videotape my sessions, and we’d review the footage together later that night. I’d never studied my training sessions like this before, and it was an eye-opening experience. I learned so much from this approach because I could actually
see
what I didn’t always
feel
as I was doing certain skills. It opened up a door to finally being able to clearly identify the things I was doing right and the things I needed to correct. Watching film certainly was not an original idea, as I’m certain the Soviets and others have been utilizing it for years, but I had seldom seen it during my training throughout the United States, and we never recorded training with the Karolyis, aside from media footage. I wondered why more coaches didn’t incorporate it in their training as it surely seems every gymnast could benefit from watching and critiquing her own routines.

Mike continued to coach and encourage me, and before too long I felt confident enough that I set my mind on doing what I never thought would be possible … training for an Elite competition at the age of twenty-four.

There were skills that still came naturally to me, like the Tsukahara element on floor exercise named after legendary Japanese gymnast Mitsuo Tsukahara. The skill is two flips in a tucked position with one 360-degree twist in the first flip. It’s a skill I’d been doing since I was nine years old and mastered by my twenties, so it came back to me relatively easily once I got in shape. I loved flipping again and it was exhilarating to learn new skills and prove that I could get better with time.

Everything was clicking, so with Mike as my coach, we set our sights on me competing at the US Nationals in 2005, knowing full well it would be an uphill battle considering all of the rules and restrictions our governing body placed on gymnasts attempting to come back after retiring. It was widely believed that USA Gymnastics
was then almost entirely controlled by Marta Karolyi, who was National Team Coordinator for Women’s Gymnastics and who didn’t appear to be a Dominique Moceanu fan by any means. As National Team Coordinator, Marta oversaw the US National team, having a powerful say in selecting the gymnasts for international assignments, as well as World and Olympic teams. We were well aware that she had the power to easily put a stop to my gymnastics comeback at any moment by simply stating “she didn’t qualify” or “didn’t meet the criteria.” Selections for the World and Olympic teams, as well as scoring, are very subjective, and Mike and I were fully aware of the politics of Elite women’s gymnastics going in. I’d seen at least a few gymnasts magically appear on the National and even World team without qualifying through the normal process. These gymnasts were selected for these teams without any explanation, not that anyone would ever question Marta. We decided to move forward anyway, feeling that if I performed well enough, I might have a chance of breaking through the politics and earning the right to compete again.

I was coming back to my sport for different reasons this time—and I moved toward my goal with a different attitude. I was wiser, mentally tougher, and totally focused on my main goal: to compete at the highest level one last time, 100 percent on my own terms.

On July 2, 2005, that sixteen-year-old boy I had met in the hospitality room eleven years earlier asked for my hand in marriage. “Yes!” couldn’t come out of my mouth fast enough. The pieces of my life that had been scattered far and wide for too long were finally coming together and settling in their rightful places.

Chapter 13

THE COMEBACK TRAIL

A
gymnast in her twenties is considered geriatric, so my “comeback” at twenty-four was virtually unheard of, especially since I’d been out of the Elite scene for a good five years. If I were younger, I would have been deterred by my critics, and at this point there were plenty of those. Haters and naysayers seemed to come out of the woodwork when I announced I was training for a comeback. By 2005, however, I was older, wiser, and definitely
more thick-skinned, so the negative comments and mean-spirited barbs didn’t sway me.

Fortunately, as I trained for my comeback, I had the support and sponsorship of Woodward Gymnastics Camp in Pennsylvania. The gym offered to cover my training and living expenses during summers in exchange for my coaching at their camps. I loved working with young gymnasts, so it was a win-win for me. I lived at the summer camp lodge and had access to the cafeteria, but I elected to bring my own food to make sure I stayed on my regimented diet. For once, I was eating a sensible, well-balanced meal plan and I didn’t want to mess that up. The Woodward facility had top-of-the-line equipment with foam pits for vaulting and floor exercise, which was key to sparing my body from the heavy pounding and overuse that is exacerbated with older equipment.

The facility was about a four-hour drive from Cleveland, so I had the freedom to come home to spend time with Mike on weekends and during my off time. While I was at camp during the week and Mike was knee-deep in his medical residency in Cleveland, we had to be creative about my training. Mike would write out my daily training plan, then email it to me each morning. It was an unorthodox method, but it worked for us. As a seasoned gymnast, I was able to stay on task and push through workouts on my own. I’d get odd looks and comments from people when they’d see me in the gym alone—no training partners, no coach. Just me and my video camera. I’d position the videocam on a tripod and review each turn as I completed it. A far stretch from how I’d trained in the past, but the video didn’t lie and held me accountable. I’d make corrections and repeat each skill until I got it right. Mike’s training philosophy, medical knowledge, and pure love for the sport helped me see gymnastics in a new light. I was training more effectively and even as a “geriatric,” I felt refreshed and more motivated than ever.

As word got out in the gymnastics community that I was training again, I’d find spectators, sometimes coaches from gymnastics
clubs who had gymnasts at camp or collegiate gymnasts and coaches, would watch my workouts from the sidelines. Sometimes these observers were very supportive, but there were always those few who watched with a critical and judgmental eye. This was to be expected and basically unavoidable since I trained in an open facility. I remember two specific occasions when bystanding coaches made personal, derogatory comments as they stood there watching me train, as if I were a circus animal there for their viewing and criticizing pleasure. The expressions of pure shock were priceless when I later learned what they had said and confronted them, telling them how their rude, inappropriate comments were disrupting my workouts. Both of these guys immediately began backpedaling and stumbling over their words after I’d confronted them. It was liberating to stand up and not be intimidated, knowing full well that I would never have had the confidence to do so earlier in my career—least of all with those who held themselves out as coaches. Thankfully, for every naysayer viewing me as a “has-been” came hundreds of supporters, and I focused on the letters, emails, and cards of encouragement that I received from fans and the gymnastics community overall as I pushed toward a comeback.

By July 2005, I was exceeding my goals and sticking my landings. Right when things were moving along so well, however, I started suffering from an intense new pain in my right Achilles’ tendon, which Mike diagnosed as Achilles’ tendinosis. We immediately slowed my trainings, but the pain persisted. Easing up on my workouts seemed appropriate to me, but I was surprised when Mike told me to take four days off for physical therapy and rest. Four days was the equivalent of forever in my mind. I still wanted to compete at the US Classic in late July, and the injury was already slowing me down. I didn’t think I could afford to put training on hold altogether. Mike was adamant, explaining how the body would attempt to repair itself, but not if I continuously tore it back down by working the
muscles and tendons where I was hurting. By this point, Mike had become a foot and ankle surgical resident, so I wasn’t about to argue with him. He was convinced that my Achilles’ required time off from the repetitive pounding in order to avoid a complete rupture of the tendon, which could end up requiring up to a year of recovery time. Mike thought that stretching and reviewing training videos was more beneficial than being in the gym and risking a rupture.