Memories of my glory days

I have a confession.

I am really into the ABC Family show "Make It or Break It."

Actually, this post isn't at all about how or why I'm slightly ashamed to be a fan of a show on ABC Family. "Make It or Break It," if you don't know, is a show about a bunch of girls on a competitive gymnastics team in Colorado. They have boy drama, freak out over nationals, sneak and get cortisone shots behind their parents backs, all this. I watch it because I'm an ex-competitive gymnast. In case I needed an excuse.

Aside from obvious things that come along with the show being fictional, there's one element that's so unrealistic that it drives me nuts.



Do you see the girl on the left? How hair is flying all down her head and her bangs are out of control? THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN IN THE WORLD OF COMPETITIVE GYMNASTICS.

Gymnasts are forced to pull Every. Strand. Of Hair. back from their faces. There are no crazy bangs, no hair falling out of the ponytail. You use multiple elastics, hair spray, bobby pins, and those metallic snappy clips that I don't know what they're called outside of Jew school where we used to call them "Kippah Clips" because boys would wear them to secure their yamakas.

The girl on the right has it down. The chick in the middle may or may not have her hair half up, but I can't really tell. If she does, that too is totally unacceptable and would never fly in a gym, especially one in which girls are supposedly the best in the country.

Seriously, people. Putting your hair up before gymnastics practice is a time consuming ritual. One that, like any weird thing we're exposed to as children, took me a long time to recover from. The progression from that level of ponytail precision to the 10 seconds it now takes me to put my hair up was a slow one, and for a long time I was sporting kippah clips and bobby pins to volleyball practice in high school. Like our childhood blankets, I guess it's something that you eventually grow out of (except Lacey, who has not so much grown out of the nasty doll that she's had since forever. Heh).

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