Every four years, starting back in 1984 after watching Mary Lou Retton, I have dreams of being on the Olympic women's gymnastics team. That year, I began begging my mom to let me take gymnastics classes. It wasn't until four years later, the fall of 1988 -- after I had reenacted the U.S. Olympic trials in our living room, using each piece of furniture as a different apparatus -- that my parents finally agreed to let me start gymnastics classes. I like to believe that it was that four year delay that kept me from standing between Shannon Miller and Kerri Strug on the top of the podium in 1996. Of course, my gymnastics career was cut short (by me) in 1992 when puberty hit, and hit hard. I grew 5 inches and gained 25 pounds that year... there's not much of a future in gymnastics for a 5'5", 115 pound twelve-year-old. (I was the tallest on my team and taller than all my coaches, for goodness sake.) Unfortunately, I was too young then to realize that just because I wasn't ever going to be a star, didn't mean it was a reason to give up doing something I loved. I missed my final end-of-the-year show because my appendix decided to burst that week, and I just never got the closure I needed when leaving the sport I loved so much and to which I'd given so much time. Maybe that's why last night, at age 28, I was spinning and twirling and jumping all over the kitchen, using the lines between the tiles as my "balance beam," and then recounted to TS in detail my entire Level 5 floor routine, a routine I haven't done in 16+ years.