Today Bear had another gymnastics meet. Overall her team did very well. In facet Claire did well too. The judges scored low on beam in general, so while her score was 8.5 (lower than the last meet) she still got 7th place. Her goal for the meet was to get over 9.0 on something, and she did on both vault and floor. That brings us to bars... She had a LOT of trouble. It started when she missed her shoot through. Then she missed her mill circle. I could see her fighting back tears as she mounted the bars one final time. With determination I can only imagine, she did the shoot through and fought her way through the mill circle. Then she finished her routine and saluted the judges. Only after she stepped off the mat did she collapse into her coaches arms crying. That coach comforted her, and then passed her off to Coach Julie, who I have waxed poetic about in the past. Coach Julie snuggled her for a minute, and then it was back to business.
The most amazing part of this story is that bars were the first event. After a start like that many kids might have messed up the whole meet, but not Claire. You could see the determination on her face as she warmed up for beam. When I asked her later how she was feeling at that moment she said, "I was thinking I'm gonna do great on my next skill!" You could see that in her face. She was pissed off, and she wasn't going to let anything beat her. That impresses me more than any of her actual gymnastics skills because I just don't have that ability to garner strength from adversity. It's not that I am a quitter, but it takes me time to recover from something like that. I may have been able to gather myself in time for the next meet, but definitely not for the next event. So today I extremely thankful that Claire is so tenacious.
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