As I went to more and more of these events, I started noticing a funny pattern: if I had a horrible warm-up, I usually ended up hitting a really nice routine. It doesn’t work that way for everyone. Sometimes a bad warm-up can throw people off. But I tend to think warm-ups are where I work out my jitters. Now, I’m literally known for my bad warm-ups! Luckily, bad warm-ups were translating to amazing meets, and with all this great momentum behind me, I felt happy about my national competitions and was looking forward to my next big step.
When I first began competing on the national level, people would constantly say, “All you have to do is get out of the country.” If anyone overheard us, they’d have thought we were fugitives! But what they meant is that you have to be good enough for Marta and her staff at the USA National Team to trust that you’ll hit your routines when they send you to compete internationally. Once you’re “out of the country,” you’re competing on a global level. It means you’re one of the best in the world.
By September 2013, Marta and the other coaches did trust me enough, and they sent me to the Japan Junior International in Yokohama. I was so excited I could hardly wait. Unfortunately, my family couldn’t make the trip with me, but they watched every second of the competition on Livestream. Marta wasn’t at that competition, either—it was just Bailie and me there competing for the United States, plus my coach, Maggie, and Bailie’s coach, too. Bailie was the perfect person to go with, because she’d been to a couple of international meets already. She knew what she was doing, so I just kind of followed her lead to avoid doing anything wrong.
One of the biggest challenges when you’re competing internationally is getting used to the time difference. I could always make the adjustment when I flew from New Jersey to Texas for camp, since that’s only a one-hour change. But the time difference between New Jersey and Japan is fourteen hours! That meant that while we were competing at four o’clock in the afternoon in Japan, it was really six o’clock in the morning at home.
To help us manage the time change, we slept on the flight there and scheduled a workout for the evening we arrived. But I still had a hard time sleeping at the hotel. I just wasn’t used to the beds: they were very hard because there was a wooden plank under the mattress, and the pillow was like a giant beanbag. Apparently, those types of beds and pillows help improve your posture, but they didn’t do much for my sleep.
Since I was tossing and turning in the middle of the night anyway, I’d get up and call my family and talk to them just as they were getting home from work and school. I learned that Bailie had the same idea: the walls were so thin between our separate rooms that when she was FaceTiming with her parents, I could hear their conversations, and whenever I was Skyping with mine, she could hear us. To make sure we were awake in the morning when we were supposed to be, we would bang on the wall and check that the other one was out of bed. We didn’t want to oversleep and miss practice or the competition!
In the end, the Japan Junior International was kind of a rough meet. I was not only tired, but since it was my first international competition, I was nervous, too. I fell on bars, did great on my individual beam final qualifying score, and then fell on beam in the final. In the end I scored a 56.750 in the all-around to win a bronze medal, and I took third on vault, fourth on floor exercise, and sixth on beam.
Around Thanksgiving that same year I went to the International Junior Mexican Cup in Acapulco. While I was excited to travel again, I don’t think people realize just how difficult it is to be away from your family on holidays or to miss family vacations. But I have no regrets, because I was doing what I loved. And besides, our host country on that trip was so thoughtful, and they held a special Thanksgiving dinner for us. The food was great, and it would have been nice to spend more time with our new friends—but we have strict rules before competitions, and getting back to the hotel early to get a good night’s sleep is one of them.
The International Junior Mexican Cup was a big competition for me. Marta was there and so were some senior team members I’d watched and admired for such a long time. I recall doing my beam routine over and over during pre-competition practice and hitting it every single time. That was a great feeling—but what was even better was that Marta noticed. I couldn’t believe my ears when she told me my beam routine was absolutely beautiful. It’s a well-known fact that Marta doesn’t give compliments easily!
At the competition, vault went well. After that it was kind of back and forth for me and Bailie: I made floor and she fell. Then she made bars and I fell. So just before beam, I got really scared and started to have a mini meltdown—What if I fall in that event, too? In a competition like that one, you’re always thinking about what every little move means for the team. But the rest of the team encouraged me, saying, “Hey, you’re fine. Stop stressing out. You got it!” So I went up there, and of course, I got my cool back and beam went well. The team, which was composed of me, Bailie Key, Veronica Hults, and Emily Gaskins, won a gold medal that day, and I took second place behind Bailie in the all-around.
As it turned out, Marta looked closely at our individual scores even during team competitions. We were all on Marta’s radar, but she had so many girls in the program, it’s not like she saw me in action all the time, since the seniors tend to be her priority. When she was choosing who to bring to Acapulco, I suspect she’d seen I’d come in second at the P&Gs. Even with that, I have to believe that seeing how close I came to the hottest competitor at the Mexican Cup was mind-blowing for her and the others. I mean, it was pretty mind-blowing for me! I was only three-tenths of a point behind Bailie. I usually don’t pay attention to other people’s scores during competitions, because I have to keep my head on my own performance. So seeing the end results was pretty wild.
If all that wasn’t crazy enough, the night after the competition we were having dinner by the beach and I looked over to see Nadia Comaneci sitting with some of the other coaches at a table near us. (If you don’t know who Nadia is, your parents will! Everyone in their generation knows her, because at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, when she was just fourteen, she became the first gymnast in Olympic history to be awarded the perfect score of 10.0. In the days that followed, she also received six more perfect 10s, taking home three gold medals. It was amazing! Then, four years later, during the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, she added two more gold medals to her collection.) Nadia, who’s from Romania, is one of my all-time favorite heroes, and now she was sitting a few feet away from me. I was shaking a little when I saw her, but I still went over to introduce myself. I said, “Hi, I’m Laurie,” and gave her a big hug. She was so nice. She smiled and said, “I know who you are. I watched you at the competition. Keep going. You’re going to be great.” I nearly passed out. All I kept thinking was, Nadia Comaneci knows who I am! I held on to her words for a few minutes, and after that, I think I just floated away.
Nadia was trained by Bela Karolyi at the experimental gymnastics camp that he and Marta established in Romania before they came to the United States. While it was Nadia who first inspired the world to fall in love with artistic gymnastics, it’s been Bela and Marta who’ve kept that love alive by fostering the careers of so many amazing gymnasts since then—gymnasts ranging from Mary Lou Retton to Simone Biles! This sport owes so much to all three of them. I owe so much to all three of them.
MY BIG BREAK
CHAPTER 7
I HAD STARTED OFF 2013 BELIEVING THAT THINGS were just going to get better and better. I’m an optimist by nature, and my experiences in international competitions during the previous season had given me added confidence that with continued practice, I’d have the skills and opportunities to go even further. But early that winter, something unexpected happened: I was practicing a skill on beam—it was a handspring also known as a triple series—and on the third mount step-out, I slipped and landed on my wrist. After X-rays, I was told I had a distal radius fracture. The radius is the larger of the two bones in your forearm, and the lower end
of that bone—the part closest to your wrist—is called the distal. That’s the part I injured.
I had actually fractured my wrist once before. That time, I had been stumbling a lot in practice, and I eventually realized my wrist had been hurting the whole day. I told my mom and she took to me to get it checked right away. It turned out my wrist was fractured. Nothing in particular had happened to cause it—I think the damage was just caused by overuse.
The timing of the distal radius fracture, though, was extremely frustrating. It meant I’d have to sit out some competitions I’d been looking forward to. It was crushing to get that kind of news, but you know in the back of your mind that the best athletes in the world train themselves to deal mentally with injury the same way they train physically. I also knew that it was far from being a career-ending injury, and I was confident that I would bounce back before the next meet season. I let myself sulk for a day or two, and then I decided to make the best of it. I kind of knew the drill: I would have to rest it and let it heal, but that didn’t mean practice, and everything else in my life, had to stop.
A big part of recovery is doing what the doctor tells you. Listening to my physician, Dr. David R. Gentile, was easy because he explained everything so well. He specializes in the treatment of sports-related trauma, particularly elbow, hand, shoulder, and wrist injuries. Luckily, when you’re young, fractures tend to mend faster. Because you’re still growing, your body is already doing the necessary work to build and strengthen your bones. Even so, being in a cast for nearly eight weeks felt like an eternity. But another part of recovery is being patient. For the first few weeks, the cast came up past my elbow. Then Dr. Gentile cut it down to just above my wrist, so I felt a lot less restricted.
The entire time I was in a cast, I made sure I stayed in great shape. I continued to do whatever skills and conditioning I could. I didn’t do anything that involved my hands, of course, but I did work my legs a lot, and as a result they became so much stronger. I thought, Well, I can still do a no-handed cartwheel—so I did! I ran every exercise possible to keep the rest of my body in peak condition while my wrist healed.
When you’re an athlete who’s sustained an injury, a lot goes into keeping your body healthy. The parts you use repeatedly are often vulnerable to reinjury. Even after I healed, I continued to see Dr. Gentile, and I learned so much from him. He promoted self-care before, during, and after practice and competition. As I mentioned, my mother and sister are both social workers, so they taught me that self-care is not just physical. It’s mental and emotional, too. Each time I got injured, they told me that everything happens for a reason, so I should just embrace it and think about what that reason might be—maybe this was simply my body’s way of saying it needed time off. And at moments like that, you must practice patience, stay positive, and even be resourceful about continuing your training. When I look back, I see that my whole approach to workouts during that period helped improve all those qualities in me. While some people would call my wrist fracture a tough break, it might just have been my lucky break, because it helped me prepare for the tough challenges still ahead.
After finally rebounding from the fracture and thinking the worst was over, I sustained yet another injury. And sadly, it would turn out to be much worse than the one to my wrist. . . .
I was training in Texas at the time. I remember the day it happened so clearly: it was early June 2014, about six months after the fracture, and I was doing a vault, and as I landed, I twisted my knee and fell to the ground. I heard something pop, and when I stood up, my leg just slipped out from under me. My knee didn’t hurt right away, although it felt uncomfortable to walk. I told the trainers what I was experiencing, but there were no visible signs that anything was wrong. Eventually Marta came over and looked at it and told me not to practice for the rest of the day. I took her advice, and by the end of the week, my knee was super swollen and the pain had kicked in, and I still needed to stay off it. We had it checked out and when I returned home, we got the news that I had a dislocated knee, a torn patella ligament, and a bruised MCL—all from one fall!
The patella ligament, just so you know, is what secures the top of the knee to the bone underneath it. When I tore mine, my kneecap slipped out of place. The MCL is one of four ligaments vital to the function and support of the knee; it runs along the inside of the knee, where it connects the thighbone and shinbone. The whole area was so swollen it looked like I had a water balloon under my skin! When we realized I was going to need surgery, I actually don’t remember the emotions I was feeling. As soon as we were told what the damage was, I knew there was nothing I could do about it. It was almost awkward that it happened when it did, right when I finally had most of my skills back after my wrist injury.
My mom was the one who stepped in and said, okay, we need to rest it and repair it as soon as possible so you heal and come back quickly. We knew what we had to do, and we set out to do it. We got in touch with USA Gymnastics immediately to get the name of a doctor who had experience treating this type of serious injury. They recommended Dr. John Fulkerson, an orthopedic surgeon who specializes in sports medicine. He was ranked among the top 1 percent of orthopedic surgeons in the country, and they told us he was the “it man” in the field for this specific set of challenges—and once we drove up to his offices in Connecticut and met with him, we agreed.
After examining my knee, Dr. Fulkerson looked at me very calmly and promised that he was going to get me back to good health. I was so grateful to be seeing someone who had performed thousands of procedures on injuries like mine, many on athletes who’d returned to their competitive sports afterward. I had been frightened before then, trying not to think the worst. The fact that Dr. Fulkerson was so confident made me a little more confident. It gave me hope.
Dr. Fulkerson’s positivity and understanding meant a lot not only to me, it meant a lot to my family, too. My parents had never pushed me into the world of gymnastics. This wasn’t their dream—it was mine. Their dream was that I be as happy as I could be, and because I loved gymnastics, they let me follow my bliss. There were definitely times when they looked at each other and asked, “Are we doing the right thing? Is this really good for our daughter?” I’m not sure they always knew the answer. But whenever they asked me, my response was “Yes.” It was never a big, long, drawn-out conversation. My dad would just look at me and say, “Are we good?” That one little question packed a lot of meaning. Whatever my answer was going to be, you could be sure he and my mom would be on board with it.
After we formulated a plan of attack with Dr. Fulkerson, I must admit that I was still scared. But I knew in my bones—even the broken and dislocated ones—that this was what I wanted to do, that this was what I needed to do to get back out there one day. So when I said, “We’re good,” my parents supported me in every way and we all moved ahead together.
ABRA-CADAVER!
CHAPTER 8
AS YOU KNOW BY NOW, MY DOCTOR KEPT HIS promise: the surgery went well, and in time, I did get full use of my knee back. But my recovery wasn’t easy.
Right after the surgery at the end of June, I remember lying totally still on the couch, and I wasn’t even moving my leg, yet it felt so awful. I thought, If it hurts right now, what is it going to feel like when I’m tumbling? I couldn’t imagine it. Even when I slept, I was in pain. Gymnasts’ legs can sometimes twitch at night. Right after the surgery, my leg was so stiff that when the twitching started, it would wake me up. It hurt more than you can know.
Aside from the physical pain, I was sad because I was no longer sure I’d ever be able to return to gymnastics. My mother didn’t have to say anything, but I could see the worry on her face, too. I had to prove not only to the people around me that I could come back, but I had to prove it to myself, too. I let myself wallow in those sad feelings for a few days, and then I came up with a plan. I decided that I would just take my time, that I’d follow the therapy process as perfectly as possible and I wouldn’t rush anyth
ing, so that when I did come back, I would come back stronger than ever.
The very next day, I returned to doing my usual stretches up against the wall in my room. When my mother saw me doing that, she was confused. Actually, she was confused and concerned. I said, “Look, Mom, you don’t understand. This is not over. This is what I want.” At the time, I don’t think I could’ve explained why I felt that way, but when I reflect on it now, I’m sure I wanted to get back to gymnastics because I am happiest and most comfortable when my body is in motion. I am pretty sassy and have a lot to say, and I love to talk more than anyone I know, and I love to write as well. But my body has a lot to say, too. It says the things I can’t say with words. That’s why I love floor so much: I am free to let my emotions flow in those routines; it’s when my body is at its most expressive.
Even though I didn’t explain my feelings exactly like that at the time, my mother heard me. A little later that day she took a picture of me doing those stretches—I still have it on my phone (I’ve shared it in this book). I keep it to remind me of the determination I had in such a difficult moment.
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