I decided to do some gymnastics today

I am sitting here waiting for the women's All-Around competition to begin, and I'm becoming extremely impatient with beach volleyball and swimming. The women's AA competition is the "premiere event" in my mind, and I don't think I'll be able to focus on the Olympics tonight until it starts.

So here's my story...Karl and I went to the Cal-Berkeley gym to work out this afternoon, ran a few errands around Berekely after that, and when we got home I started doing handstands in the driveway. Pretty soon I ran into the house and found my old gymnastics wrist guards (my wrists are completely shot from the years I was involved in this sport...without the wrist guards it hurts to do a simple handstand)...then Karl and I spent over an hour outside doing "yard gymnastics". It started as handstands...then progressed to handstand hops, then handstand pirouettes...back-bends...cartwheels...dive cartwheels...and finally I decided I needed to see if I could still do an aerial (no-handed cartwheel). Once I made up my mind that I was going to do one there was no stopping me. After two attempts and putting my hands down on both, I finally accomplished my goal and proved to myself that I could actually do an aerial! ;) It's been about two years since I have done one of these, so to do it in the backyard grass, I was pretty happy with myself. I've thought about possibly joining the Berkeley gymnastics club at Cal (they allow community members to join, even if I'm not a student at Cal) and today's antics completely increased my desire to go back to gymnastics and tumbling for fun. I'm definitely going to look into the Berkeley club.

Here's a video that Karl took of me. Sorry about the annoying background noise...someone nearby was sawing something.



I think that Karl is in the process of putting together another one of his "music videos" with some of the other backyard gymnastics videos we took today, so keep your eyes peeled for that on his blog within the next day or so! :)