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    Chalked Up: My Life in Gymnastics
    Unavailable
    Chalked Up: My Life in Gymnastics
    Unavailable
    Chalked Up: My Life in Gymnastics
    Ebook367 pages5 hours

    Chalked Up: My Life in Gymnastics

    By Jennifer Sey

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Fanciful dreams of gold-medal glory led Jennifer Sey to the local gymnastics club in 1976. A natural aptitude and a willingness to endure punishing hard work took her to the elite ranks by the time she was eleven years old. Jennifer traveled the country and the world competing for the U.S. National team, but the higher she set her sights—the world championships, the 1988 Olympics—the more she began to ignore her physical and mental well-being. Jennifer suffered devastating injuries, developed an eating disorder, and lived far from family and friends, all for the sake of winning. When her parents and coaches lost sight of her best interests, Jennifer had no choice but to redefine her path into adulthood. She had to save herself.

    Chalked Up delivers an unforgettable coming-of-age story that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt not good enough and has finally come to accept who they were meant to be.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061859960
    Unavailable
    Chalked Up: My Life in Gymnastics
    Author

    Jennifer Sey

    The 1986 national gymnastics champion and a seven-time U.S. National team member, Jennifer Sey is a graduate of Stanford University. A mother of four children, she lives in San Francisco and produced the documentary, Athlete A.

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    Reviews for Chalked Up

    4/5

    71 ratings11 reviews

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    • 4/5
      More a direct memoir than I expected from the subtitle (my fault for not reading the description before I picked it up), I found this kind of mesmerisingly horrible. I was a gymnast as a kid but stopped when my coach made it clear that the fact that I was approaching puberty was unacceptable; I never regretted it, but now I'm very glad.
    • 3/5
      I was not familiar with the author, a former national gymnastics champ. Gymnastics sounds like anything but fun, if these stories of supercritical coaches, constant starving, and working despite injuries are to be believed.
    • 5/5
      In the 1980s Sey was a world-class gymnast. She was national champion in 1986. This is the story of all of the sacrifice, physical and emotional, that it took to be an elite gymnast. This is a world in which coaches, scream, hit, and berate students. Families make huge sacrifices and become obsessed with their daughters' success. Low grade injury and pain are constant. Daily workouts and routines risk serious injury. Girls are forced to starve to be as skinny as possible, and are told that three percent body fat is unacceptable. Injuries are handled only by a team doctor, whose main consideration is getting the gymnast back winning medals. Sey was at the peak of her career in the mid-1980s. Looking back in 2013 I suspect most of us probably know that some of this sort of thing happens in elite gymnastics. Still, the full explanation and Sey's personal story show that the scope of the problem is overwhelming. I'm curious as to whether things have gotten better in the twenty-five years since Sey competed. Sey suggests that no one addresses these problems because too many people get a sort of perverse pleasure watching pre-pubescent girls fly through the air in tight leotards. I'm sure that does play a role. Sey is very clear that hers is not the story of a girl pushed unwillingly into the elite levels of gymnastics. She was and is obsessed with achievement just as she does and did love gymnastics. Sey was willing to do whatever it took to be the best, and this is not a story of victimization. Sey wanted to be the best so badly that she was willing to endure any level of emotional and physical abuse. Her parents had invested so much money that they were willing to let her. The takeaway is that there are systematic problems in competitive gymnastics. Will they ever be solved? I'm not sure.
    • 3/5
      Kinda schadenfreudey, but interesting.
      I did gymnastics for about five minutes when I was in first grade or so, but my fear of falling down and hurting myself got in the way of my Olympic dreams.
    • 4/5
      This is the autobiography of Jennifer Sey, an elite-level American gymnast who had the misfortune to be peaking in between Olympics years. Similar in subject matter and tone to the autobiography of Dominique Moceanu, Sey's book also highlights the intense physical toll that elite gymnastics takes on the body and the mind. She does not shy away from discussing eating disorders and physical injuries and their affect on her well-being, nor does she avoid discussing the larger than life personalities that inhabit the coaching ranks of the sport. Ultimately a sad story of someone with a ton of potential who never captured the brass ring, and has forever felt like a failure as a result, even though she has accomplished many amazing things in her life. An interesting read.
    • 4/5
      There is so many issues/problems/situations that athletes face that we do not always think about. This book seems like it would be a great read to understand the world of competitive gymnastics. All the details and training regiment would be awesome for students to expereience. They can see how hard work and training can pay off!
    • 3/5
      Interesting topic. I happened to stumble upon the book in the library and decided to give it a read. Usually kept my attention, but I found that waning at times. The writing made the memoir difficult to read at some points. Example: the unusual & repetitive use of 'inauspicious.' I did enjoy reading about the journey of a U.S. champion and her sacrifices toward that goal. As one reviewer mentioned, it is indeed unflattering and seems an honest account of the joys and shame of her world.
    • 5/5
      Jennifer Sey was the US national gymnastics champion in 1986 and this is her book about the sport. It was not an easy book to read. She relates how they had to starve themselves – literally – to satisfy their coaches, so that she was suffering from constant hunger pains, and how injuries were not allowed to heal properly in order not to lose training time, because once a girl grows up she won’t be able to perform competitive stunts which require a small, compact body, and so time is short. Twice the author had a leg broken in gymnastics accidents and both times the training center’s doctor had the cast removed much earlier than the hospital doctor had recommended. Sey writes that by 1986 when she won the US Nationals (at 16) she felt constant pain from her various injuries and could only practice on a very generous dose of painkillers, without which she was barely able to walk. And yet nobody made her do it – it was wholly her own choice. She was a very good student and later enjoyed a successful career in marketing, but in gymnastics she could be “the best,” and no subsequent achievement could give her comparable satisfaction. However, after 1986 she had to quit without realizing her dream of making the Olympic team, because her body couldn’t take it for two more years. As it is, she practically became an invalid for life. She writes: “With each step across the pavement, my beaten ankles shock. The balls of my feet, permanently bruised from gymnastics, ache with every stride. My knees grind and creak each time I rise from the chair….” And these are obviously general aftereffects of gymnastics, not of her specific past injuries. She said subsequently in interviews that her book is not intended as an indictment of the sport of gymnastics, and that she just wanted to tell her story, but I can’t think of a more powerful indictment of the sport of gymnastics than her story. But then even watching any gymnastics competition on TV makes it obvious how extremely dangerous it is and how it would be impossible to seriously go into it without experiencing some horrendous injuries. Jennifer Sey writes that besides ambition it was the feeling of flying or weightlessness that attracted her to gymnastics and that she still misses it daily, but to experience this feeling one doesn’t need to perform the sort of stunts required in competitions. Having read this book, I began to think that they should remove gymnastics from the Olympic roster of sports and discontinue championships of any kind, and just leave it a recreational activity; then there’d be no drive for death-defying stunts and kids (and maybe even adults) would do it just for the feeling of flight. But, of course, had anybody officially suggested that, the sports community would be up in arms.
    • 5/5
      Jennifer Sey, 1986 Gymnastics USA National Champion, writes of her experiences as an elite gymnast - the "merciless coaching, overzealous parents, eating disorders and elusive Olympic dreams". It is powerful, unflattering, and disturbing.Chalked Up is one of those books you will share with friends.
    • 5/5
      I couldn’t put this book down, and I read it in a few hours. (This was also perhaps helped by some insomnia, but still . . . ) Apparently this was a much-talked about book in gymnastics circles earlier this year when it came out. I was not aware of it when the title caught my eye from a display a branch library the other day. Prior to actually reading it, however, I looked up the author’s website and blog. I didn’t recognize her name, though if she was in gymnastics in the ‘80s, I really might have seen her on tv at some point. I watched gymnastics back then, wanting to take part, knowing I was too old and too big all at the same time. Sey won the 1986 US National Championships. She was worn out and exhausted, and with lingering injuries before the 1988 Olympic trials. This book really shows me that I would have never had the guts to do it. Sey says that as a kid, she really, really wanted it, and tried hard to be good enough. However, she was never good enough, at least in her mind. Her coaches all managed to point that out often as well. Even when she was little, age 7, her coaches kept telling her she wasn’t going to get anywhere if she was scared. (I would have been too scared. I might have liked the floor tumbling routines, but doing the same on the balance beam?? No way. I tried a summersault on the balance beam once in a beginner’s gymnastics class, and that was enough.) Sey is quite critical about the coaching styles in the elite level of gymnastics. She admits that to stay competitive that she had to keep in shape even while she was recovering from injuries, but she does ask why no one in elite gymnastics puts a stop to pressuring, insisting that gymnasts keep ruining their bodies to achieve an often elusive dream. She also brings up the parents. I get the sense that her parents were not necessarily pressuring her at the beginning, but by the time Sey reached the elite level, her parents and family had rearranged their whole lives to focus on her goal. By the time that Sey was burning out, her mother was pushing her to kept trying to go on, to reach the ’88 Olympics. Sey admits that during all of those years, she did not or could not recognize the sacrifices her entire family was making for her. She feels bad now for a lot of things. Sey is also very candid about her “diet” strategies to loose weight, and how weight was/is such a big deal in elite gymnastics. She is also candid about how she would peel the skin on her fingers as a way to cope. This is not always pleasant reading, but then I did not expect this book to be a pleasant happy read. One part of her life that I wish she’d gone into more was her decision about a breast reduction (after she quit gymnastics, she matured and gained weight, and was not happy with the size of her chest). She does express that when she had her first son, she felt like she was not good enough because she could not produce enough milk for her baby due to the breast reduction. I feel like there is something lacking here, though. After all of the details (“despite the self indulgence”, page 279), then she kind of skips through life now. (And I wanted to know more about her BR, given that I understand, at least to some degree, because I had a BR, too.) I do like Sey’s Afterword. She feels like a failure in everything she does now. Ever since she attained success at a young age, she says, “It is inevitable that anything less than number-one status provokes feelings of failure. . . I work myself to the brink of exhaustion to suppress the feelings of not being good enough.” However, she goes on to say that really she is not a failure, that she is trying to do her best to raise her two little boys, that she forgives her parents and thanks them. A nice thing is that she does have an online presence, and you can go to her web site and find links to articles and pictures from her years in gymnastics in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
    • 4/5
      This is the story of Jennifer Sey, the 1986 U S National Gymnastic Champion. The book tells us of her mindset, what drove her to compete and what it took for her to reach that level of competition. It begins at the age of 3 when she learned her first cartwheel, and takes us through to the present. What she went through on a mental and physical level to reach a goal is both inspiring and upsetting, as is what's next for a person, still so young, who has spent their entire life in training for a small window of opportunity.We're told of many things that you wouldn't normally hear about unless you were involved in, or knew someone in this field. From the mental and verbal abuse by some coaches to manipulate their athlete into the proper mindset. The politics which often don't reward the person with the best performance. Training and performing through injuries that would have most of us totally side-lined. The issues with weight, eating, sacrifice of the family, etc, etc.I dare you to NOT think of this book when watching a women's gymnastic event after reading what the girls go through to reach this point.The book was written in a way that was easy to read, and I thought gives us a good idea of what takes place beyond what we see on TV. And while we see what we may interpret as the horror of a young life, the author doesn't blame others for much of what she goes through. It's her own thoughts, fears and determination that bring her to where she is in life.This book should be read by anyone with a girl involved in gymnastics who wants to compete.