Wednesday, April 12, 2006 // 11:37 PM

i can't believe. i have 4 trainings left of my gym career. i can't really claim that gym's been some major part of my life since ny days, but you've always been something i took for granted. i think the sec 4 me would be appalled at the stage to which i have come, by now, the lack of training, the sheer unreadiness, the instability of my routine when i'm already looking competition one-week-away in the face. how perfectionist were we, how much drunk on adrenalin and willpower, in ways. at least i have the comfort of knowing that glorydays, i had them, we had them, together, once upon a time.

i love it when the gym is semi-empty, with wang watching the last few routines from sarah and melissa, and the trampoline is just unabashedly ours, for those ten minutes, that half an hour. in the buildup to competition no one's got the time to play around with different combinations of flips and synchronised routines. my favourite thing is to have the entire trampoline all to myself, the liberty of being able to train in short sharp bursts, and then exhausted fall back onto the tramp net and lie there, with the trampoline rocking you like a baby, looking up at the ceiling and waiting for my heartbeat to return to normal. and then doing it all over again. my best routines have been born of those moments. i love how it feels to fly ever high, to complete a really good routine, to feel so completely gorgeously in control.

yet somehow i think i will quickly forget how much i love this, and will therefore forget to miss it. because there are so many things going on in my life right now this is not one of the most gorgeous things about my life. watching sean and xinyi on the trampoline made me half wish that i hadn't cut training for those months upon months, but i do know that if i had to do it all over again it wouldnt have been any different. it's really easy for me to forget how much things mean to me when they're not up there in my face all the time. and i know that the time freed up after training stops doesnt actually mean that i'll be very free, because things will inevitably snap up my time, things always do snap up my time. things like obligations and my own interests. there is not enough time for me to do all the million things i am so very interested to do. and gym, trampoline you may have six years of my life but you've just become so much smaller a portion of my life that i honestly do think i might not miss you, very much. especially since i do know, i haven't really staked very much.

i feel like i should be more hyped, more nervous about competition being in 7 days. it's not that i've never felt fear or nervousness with trampoline, it's not that all these years i have been some sort of stoic. i just am not afraid of it. i am just so very conscious of this not being the be-all-and-end-all. that's why i can be pretty unbothered about my routine's very low success rate right now. but nervousness, nervousness is a different thing, of course i feel it. you think my heart doesn't beat faster standing there waiting for the judges to ring me to start? but nervousness is not the same as fear. and while nervousness comes and goes as it will, irrational thing as it is (specimen a, xinyi), fear can be put away, or at least fought, to some extent. i think at the end of the day i so adamantly refuse to be afraid of competition because i keep finding myself thinking: if we lose, so what? well so what. i'm not going to love the sport any less, i really don't think. i have a relationship with the trampoline that no number of medals or the lack of it can possibly profoundly impact.