Gymnastics... Or not?

Author's note: I cannot tell you if this is true or false directly. When I was little, I was like a little monkey and I liked climbing around on the furniture and the playground. My mom signed me up for gymnastics so I could climb around everywhere, tire myself out, and also become more athletic. Enough with this blabbering. Here is my story.

I was very flexible when I was younger. I could do push-ups, pull-ups, the splits, cartwheels, somersaults,  and everything that you did when you were in gymnastics. I could even do little flips on the trampolines there! I remember the thrill of swinging myself past the monkey bars, doing a somersault on the mat below it, then standing quickly to do a double cartwheel. It was amazing being so flexible. But now, I can't do anything like that to save my life. I always looked where the older girls were doing even more than that. They could swing around bars, do triple flips in the air, land on the mat, do a double somersault, and jump up right at the end of the mat. All in about 6 seconds. I sometimes wish that I could go back to that. There was only one thing at that gymnastics place that I absolutely was terrified of. I don't remember the name of it, but there was this huge pit with a bunch of foam kind of blocks in it. Whenever they threw me in that thing, I about had a panic attack and had to fight my way through the dreaded blocks to get to safety on the platform around the pit. I always thought of it as the death pit. There was this really tall wall next to the pit, which had these ropes that they made us climb. I felt like a spider about to drown in a hot stuffy pit filled with blocks. Everyone else thought it was fun for some strange reason. I once asked one of the people in my group what was under the pit, but her answer wasn't very assuring: "I had a friend here that went under the blocks, and she fell through the bottom and one of the instructors had to get her through a secret door in the back! She said that there were tons of spiders and snakes down there!" So after that, I kept trying to go down to see if there was a space below them. I got really close once, and I could feel a draft of air on my foot, but I forced myself to pull myself out of that pit. That was my gymnastics life, and I did that for about 2-3 years.