Sometime between age fourteen and the mid-twenties, many of us come in contact with Ayn Rand. The result of this contact is all too often a period of suffering for those around us. My phase lasted about 2 months during the summer before my second year in college. Three weeks of reading ‘Atlas Shrugged’ and over a month of an obnoxious, arrogant, walking asshole – spouting platitudes about ‘The Virtue of Selfishness.’ I was very much alone around this time. The family lived far away and friends that I had moved up north with had returned back home because of money troubles.

So I’m walking around thinking of myself as one of the ‘do-ers,’ one of Nietzsche’s supermen. I could piss on a plate and not splash. I’m also reading Plato’s ‘The Republic’ because, well, you can’t get too much of a good thing. When the time came to pick my classes for the fall semester, I decided I would try to approach my education from a more holistic point of view, the way the Greeks did. I would take writing to nourish the heart, calculus for the mind, piano for the soul, and gymnastics.

I don’t recall the sport grabbing me in any particular way at first. The teacher, Marge, was more of a dance instructor than anything else. I went. I stretched. I danced. I took written exams on which dance step was which. What sticks out in my memory was the first day of instruction on the rings. We were asked to try a muscle-up, which is nothing more than hanging from the rings, arms overhead, and pulling up until the wrists are at the hips. I watched the bigger guys huff and puff, veins popping out of their foreheads, teeth grinding sparks.

They couldn’t do it. I could.

I began to see a vindication of all the sixth grade beatings before my eyes -- the trash cannings, head nuggies, the whirlies, wedgies, and getting picked last. The lunch money was gone, forever, but now, instead was the idea that my smaller stature could be seen as an advantage instead of a liability. I mean look at these dinosaurs, no style, no grace. I always knew they couldn’t dance worth a shit.

But this kind of childish ‘I guess I showed them’ stuff is not reason enough to stay in the sport for another 7 years, nor is it deserving of a spot in Eugene’s magazine. There was something underneath all along, something deeper that came through over the next couple of days. To begin with I ached the next day – ached in the way only a gymnast can understand. My entire upper body was complaining and whining, which was annoying, but also wonderful. We hadn’t communicated much, my muscles and I – hadn’t asked much or expected much. But now, while I intend to keep this up, it was clear that I would have to do this regularly, eat better, and live better.

In addition I began to sleep better on those workout days. Those that do not suffer from insomnia can’t understand what it’s like to spend half the night listening to an unsettled mind pacing in the shell of a body just trying to get to sleep. I still can’t say whether this is because I’m just too exhausted to stay up or that my mind has been cleared by the exertion. I do know that if I go more than a week without a workout, I become an asshole again. I snap at people, look for reasons to get angry, obsess over the smallest details, and my work suffers because I can’t sit still. So it seems as though I have no choice but to keep on doing it. Unfortunately, I started rather late, and my abilities are very one sided – mostly rings and parallel bars. My goal is to compete in all-around. I figure if I take care, I’ll be able to keep doing it until I’m 70.