Personal Narrative: What Leads To Failure

"Pop! Pop!...Smack!" From the vault table to the mat in less than a second. Tears began to well up in my eyes as I sat on the chalky, eight inch mat. I grasped at my elbow hoping the pain would soon go away but my hopes did nothing but make me feel worse as I waited. My coach rushed over to me from her spotting block and asked me, "Are you ok? What hurts the most?", and as I attempted to answer, the tears started running down my sweaty face. The pain wasn't going away and I drowned out all the sound around me. All I could think about was that I had regionals in less than 3 weeks. The voice in my head was on repeat saying, "I have to keep on going, I have to push through the pain." So I stood up, told her I was fine, and went to get a drink …show more content…
I went from good to bad, bad to worse, bad to good, and so on. It was like a never ending trap of accomplishment leading to failure leading to accomplishment. My story reminds me of the story of Sisyphus the eternally punished king of Ephyra. Since he was thrown into the underworld, he goes through the daily struggle of rolling a huge boulder to the top of a hill only to see it roll back down. His actions in the upper world were the cause of his punishment. One action Sisyphus took in the upper world that got him into the situation he is now is that he chained up Thanatos, or “death”. This all started when Sisyphus was talking to Asopus the god of …show more content…
Regionals, for gymnastics, is against 7 states, and I was one of many gymnasts representing the state of Wisconsin. I was not going to let my new elbow injury stand in my way of doing that. I trained on it for the next few weeks after I initially hurt it and took off to go to Coralville, IA. I managed to push through all the pain during the meet however when I was on my last apparatus, vault, I gave the audience, judges, coaches, and other competitors a surprise. “Kata-kata-kata-kata-kata-kata-kata-ka...boing, bam, smack!” The sounds of me vaulting, running down the runway to bouncing off the springboard to blocking off the table with one arm to landing on the 8 inch mat below. I completed it successfully but notice how I said blocking off with only one arm. Vault is an apparatus that you always need to use both your arms on, but that day my body decided I didn’t need it, so I did a one armed vault. After that my crazy meet season was over and spent 5 weeks without putting pressure on my left arm. I could do nothing but lower body and abdominal conditioning along with dance on balance beam and floor. After that torturous 5 weeks was over, I was back, back for good. Or so I thought. I started to do some tumbling warm ups on my first day back and ended up setting myself back another two weeks. After waiting to “heal” again, I had one practice at my