I'm an adult gymnast (though I just turned 23 and am a college student and feel more like a teenager
) My whole life I wanted to be a gymnast, but I'm very very tall and very very lanky. As a kid my mom enrolled my brother and I in rec classes and the coach told her, when I was 5, my body type wasn't suitable. My brother, who's now a 6' 4" 200 lbs. ice hockey player, didn't grow until high school and was amazing at gym until he quit after a couple years of competitive. My cousin was a competitive gymnast and a year older than me, by middle school she was L 10 and I was really envious.
Instead I started basic rec classes because I've wanted to be a gymnast my whole life. I played every sport imaginable as a kid, swimming, basketball, soccer, t-ball, field hockey, volleyball... but I really focused on ice hockey (guys full contact) and track and field. I went out for track in middle school and ended up getting the school record the first meet and signed up for a club team. I ended up running at the national level in middle school through college. In high school I made the junior national team and then I went onto college to compete DI on scholarship. I wound up hurt, I ran on stress fractures for 4 years and had other major injuries which led to me having metal rods inserted into my foot after my freshman year of college. I did PT all season with no luck and the summer after sophomore year I had the rods taken out. They did nerve damage including a sliced nerve we didn't know about until 6 months later. That whole time I couldn't walk/used crutches and was in agonising pain to the point of me getting sick. My mom moved me home and I quit track. After I took sometime off I transferred to my state's major school and ended up walking onto the track team. I ran a season, finally competing NCAA, even though I didn't do well for lots of reasons. I tried to go back to my junior national club coach later but stopped when I moved to Australia with my fiance.
After all those sports I started adult gym classes to get the flexibility and strength and of course for fun! (I still can't do a cartwheel). I lived next to one of the US Olympic girls in college and we became good friends and I started really following high level elite gymnastics. Right now I'm not that involved in gym unfortunately. I got sick in Perth and was hospitalised for ages then med-evaced back to the US because of my insurance and for rehab. It involved major blood clots all over both legs, a bacterial infection where both legs swelled up so bad you couldn't see any bones and a virus in my nerves and spinal cord. I'm currently paralysed from the hips down with some motion in my left leg, enough to use crutches for 10 ft at a time. I was hoping to really get involved in some adult gym classes but instead have just started sled hockey, which is great, and monoskiing, which I've done because I'm a kid's ski instructor and do mostly adaptive lessons. It's fun but I still wish I could do gym classes. I try to do a lot of core strength and other strecthing drills, so it's kind of like gym!! I'm still also a HUGE fan of everyone from my friends and relatives to the elites and other country's teams.
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