Letters to Nowhere(67)

“I’m sticking the next one,” Stevie said while we both stood at the end of the runway, waiting for Blair to vault on the other runway. She had just been cleared to vault and tumble again, but Bentley wanted her to have a whole week of landing on mats in the pit before trying the hard competition landing mats.

“Me, too,” I said, staring straight ahead.

“My back’s a little sore. That’s why I haven’t gone for the stick yet.”

“Me, too.”

Stevie waited for Bentley to watch Blair’s Yurchenko double vault, then she took off. My eyes zoomed in on her from the run all the way to the medium–sized hop forward on her landing. I glanced down at the tape measure to make sure I was at eighty feet and I felt myself smiling at the floor. Stevie’s vault wasn’t quite a stick.

I can beat her.

I took off and had a great hurdle and an awesome block off the vault table, but had to take a big step slightly to the side which I knew would hurt my score a lot. The judges taped lines down the landing mat and took major points off if you stepped sideways outside of the tape.

“Very good, Karen,” Bentley said.

“I want to stick it,” I said more to myself than to him as I let out a frustrated groan.

“You don’t need to worry about sticking yet.”

Why? Because I’m never competing this vault? Because I’m not good enough to stick it? “Is there a technique to sticking? Like, if everything is in place and done correctly, what makes some people step and others not step? I’m tired of just trying to stick and then hoping it happens. It feels like I’m spinning one of those wheels in Vegas, leaving it to luck that I land on the right spot.”

Bentley surprised me by laughing. “Okay, I can tell you my secret.”

He had my full and undivided attention, though I was slightly wary of getting some philosophical lesson that I’d never be able to figure out. “So, what you have to do is relax just a little as your feet hit the mat—not that you don’t have to be tight, it’s the core strength that truly gets you a good landing on vault—but if you can focus on sinking that excess energy into the floor, it might help you.” Bentley pointed to the blue landing mat. “Lie down flat on your back, raise your arms above your head.” I did as he said and he knelt down beside me, sticking his hand under my lower back. “You know this exercise very well from all the handstand work, right?”

“The one where I try to get my lower back all the way flat to the floor,” I said.

“Exactly.” He removed his hand from under me. “Now close that gap and think about what you have to do to make that happen.”

“I’m using my stomach muscles,” I answered, not sure where this was going.

“Yes, but at the same time you have to release the air from your lungs to flatten your back, and exhaling is a relaxation technique. So, think about squeezing everything on the landing, but at the same time relaxing your body into the mat the same way you just used the strength of your abs to relax your lower back to the floor.”

I stood up and Bentley did the same. “Okay, it kind of makes sense…sort of.”

As I trotted down the runway, Ellen took off for her turn and Stevie followed. I closed my eyes for a few seconds and zeroed in on sinking my body into the floor. But on my next turn, everything went so fast and there were so many new things to think about that I landed with my lungs still full of air and took two giant steps forward.

Stevie’s hops got even smaller. But neither of us could stick the vault, and honestly, it wasn’t a vault most people expected you to stick, but I wanted it bad and so did she. Our little chats got shorter and shorter throughout the morning workout while we battled each other. I had Stevie beat by a ton on bars, but she still topped me in difficulty on beam and floor, now that she had almost all her skills back again.

Ellen was dragging a little, probably from jet lag and post–meet mental exhaustion, and Blair was so excited to be working on all four events now that she was in her own world. It was pretty much the Stevie and Karen show today.

By the time eleven o’clock came around and we were sent to do cooldown stretches on the floor, I could hardly move. I collapsed onto the carpet, closing my eyes and pretending to do visualization exercises when really I was about thirty seconds from falling asleep and couldn’t even manage so much as a mental vault, let alone any stretching. I felt my conscious thoughts slipping out of reach when something hard landed right on my stomach.

My eyes opened halfway as my mental response caught up with my body’s physical reaction. Through my blurred vision, I saw a round brown object rolling off my body, and before I could take a second to process it, I screamed.

Loud.

I heard Stevie, Ellen, and Blair gasp nearby, and when I scrambled to my feet, a little girl with brown pigtails, maybe three or four years old, stood a few feet away clutching a basketball, her chubby arms barely able to wrap all the way around it. My heart was flying and I could hardly breathe. The shock of going from nearly asleep to scared as hell was too much for my body to handle.

The girl’s lip started trembling, and then a full–out wail erupted from that tiny mouth, filling the silence that had suddenly fallen on the gym. I clutched my chest as a woman rushed over from the lobby, snatching up the little girl in her arms and throwing a glare in my direction. I looked over at my teammates, who sat with their eyes wide, mouths hanging open.