Archive for March, 2010

Yesterday I was reading Al Fongs latest blog entry “My Coaching peers remember when…“. It made me think about all of the things that I have told my gymnasts about how I trained and they laughed at me! So I made a list like Al Fong. You don’t realise how good you’ve got it girls!

• When I first started gym my club had only wooden benches to work on, after three years in the club, we bought a high balance beam. So yes, we used to enter competitions having never practiced on a beam!

• We had one springboard to share between the whole club

• My first leotard was lycra!!

• I first learned to swing on the bars, on a metal bar – no, not a metal loop bar with gloves but a metal bar!

• We had to put our music on tapes and search for days and days for music, slowly fast forwarding to the part that we needed to use for our routine. It used to take ages to get it right, as opposed to nowadays when music is so easily available to gymnasts. We couldn’t easily get any piece of music we wanted

• We didn’t have a full sprung floor to work on, in fact I don’t even think there was a full sprung floor available until nearer the time had to give up training.

• When doing full floor routines, we used to place extra matting where we would be doing our “big tumbles” – big being just a round off triple flip and maybe a front somi! We even did our dance parts on the wooden floor.

• We vaulted on a horse vault and found the vaulting table very scary when it was first introduced

• It wasn’t as easy as it is now to buy leotards. They weren’t as easily available but now there are so many companies, online and offline that sell leotards. I’m sure in some countries you might even be able to buy them in shops and stores

• When I first began training, we had only three short floor strips, blue school PE mats and some green mats which fell apart and smelled like feet. I can remember the day we first got a big carpet roll mat and everytime we bought one after that.

In fact, looking at the club now, I can remember when every single piece of equipment we have now arrived to the gym for the first time! In the last 17 years – we’ve come a long way!

What old memories do you have? Please share in the comments below!