Change

Wow. Ninth grade has gone by so fast and it has been a huge year of change.

A major change this year is that I stopped doing gymnastics half way through the year. Gymnastics has been a part of my life for literally forever, so stopping was a really tough decision. I didn’t know what I would do without it, but I have become closer to my friends and made some new ones. I started doing track, which was really fun, but I am sad to say is coming to an end with the school year.

Until next year track.

This summer will be the first summer I have absolutely nothing on my weekly schedule. I have made many plans to explore new opportunities. I am planning to try new sports such as cross-country running, tennis, diving, and anything else I come across. I also hope to take art classes and travel with my friends.

I am still close with my teammates from gymnastics, after all the time we spent together I don’t think I could ever part from them (we are all going to see Pitch Perfect 2 together next week and I am super stoked). My previous coach even wants me to come in and start coaching this summer.

Throw back to that one time. We are CUTE.

A question a lot of people have been asking me is if I will ever go back to gymnastics. Well here is my answer. Right now, I don’t know what I am going to do. I am just going to try new things and have fun over the summer. Maybe one day I will find myself back in the world of gymnastics. But don’t you worry, “I am going to do back-tucks (which is the same thing as a backflip for all of you uneducated people) until I am eighty”. I have stolen this saying from a teammate who stopped a few years before me. So far she has kept it up, and so have I. I mean she is only seventeen and I am only fourteen but….we will get there one day.

Tumbling on the beach.

I will never regret the time I spent in gymnastics. It shaped me into who I am today and allowed me to meet many new people and give me opportunities I wouldn’t have had without it. Now it is time to start a new chapter of my life and see what comes next. (yes, yes, I know, cheesy as cheese)

Who knows if I will use this blog again, but it has been a fun experience for me, and I am sure you had a glorious time reading about my life, because I am the most interesting person out there. But really, I enjoyed writing for all of you. Well, have a great summer (or HAGS if you want to throw it back to fourth grade). Until next time…

Morgan

Who's Ed?

Coming up in less than a month is Running With Ed. Running With Ed is an annual event held right here in Park City, Utah. It is a thirty-eight mile race that raises money for the Park City Education Foundation. There are ten legs of the race ranging from 1.75 miles to 6.0 miles. It starts early in the morning, and ends late in the evening. There are about four-hundred teams who run the race. All of the schools and other Park City land marks have awesome exchange stations. They all have food, live music, and they are just a party. 

All of the teams dress up in crazy costumes and it is always fun to see what they come up with!

Last year was my first year participating in Running With Ed. I got together some of my teammates from gymnastics who had previously stopped, and we created the team Flipping for Ed.

In the field house before the race.

We had so much fun planning for the race, decorating the car, and even enjoyed running. It was a great opportunity to catch up with my old teammates and just have fun together. We of course took handstand pictures everywhere since we were a team made of all gymnasts.

Handstands at the Canyons.

And one of my coaches, Mara, took so many pictures everywhere we went that she used all of the space on her phone.

Mike, Jamie, and I.

Running With Ed was such a fun experience and I am so excited for Running With Ed this year!

Spring Break

This spring break, I spent half of my time in Las Vegas and the other half back home in Park City. In Vegas, I hung out at the pool, went shopping, and went on an adventure walking around the Strip. Every day, my family and I had a scrumptious breakfast, delicious lunch, and luscious dinner. But seriously, the food was soooo good. Then of course there was the warm weather. So one day my family and I went on an adventure. It was the best day of the trip, so I will explain in detail my day. To start off the day, my family went to Paris for breakfast. Yum! Next we walked around some of the hotels, all of which have something interesting such as fountains or a garden of flowers.

A turtle made of flowers in the Bellagio. 

Then we went to all of the candy stores you can think of. M&M World, Coca-Cola World, and Hershey’s World. We ate lots of M&M’s, taste tested twenty-four different flavors of Coca-Cola, and stood under a giant Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. 

M&M store!

That night after dinner, we went to see the Cirque De Sole show Ka. It was amazing! AND my gymnastics coach from about four years ago just started preforming in the show. I wasn’t able to see her in person but I saw her swinging across the stage from the ceiling. So that was pretty cool.

To top off the night, after the show we rode the roller coaster New York, New York. It was really cool to ride it at night where we could see the whole city covered in lights from the roller coaster on top of the hotel.

My family in front of the New York, New York.

So Vegas was pretty fun.

Vegas

This week is spring break, and it is the first spring break I have been able to go out of town. Usually, the final gymnastics meet of the season falls the week of or the week after spring break, so I have to stay and train, but this spring break, my family went to Las Vegas. The whole point of this trip was my brother’s golf tournament. We were there for five days, and three of those days he had a tournament.

Vegas is a strange place. First of all, it is one of few states that gambling is legal. I don’t understand the point of gambling. I mean, you know you are not going to win. Well, actually, my mom put in one dollar and won ten dollars, but there is a very, very, very small chance of winning. But, no matter the slim chance, there are a lot of people who stay up ALL NIGHT gambling. The funny thing is, when my mom won ten dollars, my brother, who is in seventh grade, became obsessed. “Put in another dollar! Go to that machine that one looks good! You are going to win I can feel it!” He convinced her to put a dollar in every once in a while, so by the end of the trip only three of those ten dollars were left. When my brother is twenty-one, he should be banned from Vegas because I do not want him spending all of our money. 

The other weird thing about Vegas is how it is full of hotels that represent other countries. Like, they have the Eiffel Tower and a hotel to represent Paris, by why not just go to Paris? I guess I understand that it is a lot cheaper to go to Paris in Las Vegas than to Paris in France. But who started this idea of putting these representations in Vegas? 

Paris...Las Vegas

And of course, there are the clothes. I love just sitting down somewhere on the Strip and just watching people walk down the street and observe their outfits. My mom and I do this together, and it is quite entertaining. We will have competitions with each other to see who can find the craziest pair of shoes or the most interesting outfits.

I guess I ran out of space to right about my actual trip...but maybe you will hear about it soon.

Is It Easter Yet?

Image courtesy of interflora

Easter is a time for eggs, chocolate, and community service. Even though Easter is still a week away, today I made fifty-four Easter baskets for the Christian Center. Yep! I did that all by myself. Just kidding, I had some help. I worked with a group called the National Charity League. It is a mother / daughter group who works with different charity groups. So, about ten girls and their moms came over to my house to make Easter baskets. Everyone was instructed to bring trinkets to put in the Easter baskets like pencils, stickers, bubbles, etc. And of course, the chocolate and fruit snacks.

All of our Easter baskets!

But before this whole event started my friend Elise came over to my house. Elise and I had been planning to make homemade ice cream for a few months, and we finally found a day where we both could. Elise came over, and we had a marvelous time making homemade vanilla ice cream with strawberries. It was quite delicious. Next, we made brownies, (the fudge-y ones, not the cake-y ones) but we are lame because we just made them from a box. But it was ok, because they were for the Easter-basket-making group anyways.

After Elise left, my mom and I began setting up all of the Easter basket trinkets, the food, and cleaning up the house. People began to arrive, and all of the girls started stuffing the Easter eggs with chocolate eggs and fruit snacks. After filling about one hundred Easter eggs, we all grabbed a basket and filled them until they were overflowing with the Easter goodies. 

Once we were finished, we ate the wonderful food I picked out. There was a fruit plate (but fresh fruit from the grocery store my mom cut right before which tastes a lot better than a tray that already has fruit cut on it that you buy at the grocery store) and a veggie plate with hummus (also freshly cut). But enough with the healthy food. We also had chex-mix (most people just picked out the M&Ms), which I made myself, and the yummy fudge-y, not cake-y brownies. YUM. That was the perfect combination of healthy and non-healthy foods.

The next day, I went with my mom and dropped off all of the Easter baskets at the Christian Center. They asked if they could take a picture of me with the baskets, and they put it on their Facebook page. I am now famous.

Yep. Famous. I mean there are eighteen likes and everything.

Meet 2

Five days after my first track meet, there was a second. This meet was more fun and less chaotic, in my opinion. There were about half the amount of people who went to this meet than to the last. Guess what that means…..NO CROWDED SCHOOL BUSES! There were only two to a seat, and no one was on the floor. YAY! While on the bus, Daisy and I decided to play card games. This was quite fun, and we surprisingly did not have the complications of the slipping, sliding, and falling cards until we were towards the end of the ride. 

We got to the meet, unloaded, and waited to see what we were going to run. This meet was set up differently than the last one. The first meet, everyone had to be registered in advance for what event they would be doing and that was the coaches job. At this meet, we could do up to four events, and choose whatever we wanted. I decided to do the one-hundred, two-hundred, four-hundred, and long jump. But it wasn’t as easy as that. I mean, I am super bad at making decisions, so it took me a while, and I still wasn’t sure if I was going to run some of those events for sure until it came time for them. 

The 100 was the first event, followed directly by long jump. Then I just hung out on the bleachers while waiting for the 400-hundred. This was the first time I had ever run the four-hundred at an actual race pace. I had run it as a slow jog, but never for time. This was the event I was debating about doing the most. I finally decided to run it when they announced the last call for the event. Last was the two hundred, which I knew I definitely was going to do. After that is was time to wrap up in a blanket, huddle with your teammates, and cheer everyone else on. 

Sunset at the end of the meet!

Meet 1

Today was my first track meet ever. I was not feeling very prepared because there have only been two weeks of practice, but, it went pretty well. It was Friday, so we still had school, but it was a super short day because there was a debate tournament at the school. When we got out of school at eleven-thirty, Daisy, Ali, Ansley and I went to El Chubasco for lunch. This place is amazing. (I seem to say that about every restaurant. I guess you could say I just love food.) 

After stuffing ourselves as much as we could without getting sick when we run, we walked over to the Maverick gas station. Ummm…why would we go to the gas station? None of us have cars….well, here is my explanation. I was freaking out because I didn’t have any gum so I convinced them to go to the gas station so I could buy gum. Yep. That happened. So while we were at the gas station, everyone else bought some candy to put in the food locker for school. Yes, we have a food locker, no, you cannot have the combination. 

Waiting for our first event to start.

From the gas station we walked back to the high school and got ready for the meet. We got back a little later than we had hoped, so while we were scrambling around for our uniforms, the team started to load onto the bus. By the time we were on the bus, it was totally full. Luckily, Daisy, Ansley and I found a seat, but Ali had to cram into a seat with two other unknown girls . Whoops. Sorry Ali. You may think, “Eh, that’s not bad”, but imagine a bus filled with seventy-two high school students (we happened to have exactly the maximum capacity allowed on the bus), with all of their school bags, and track bags. There were three students to a seat, and some people had to sit on the floor by the emergency exits. It was about a forty-five minute drive.

 We arrive at the track meet, and that is when the commotion escalates even more. No one has any idea what we are going to run, when each event is happening, where the coaches are, where we need to be, etc. It didn’t help that the upperclassman were not at this meet to help guide us through the chaos and cluelessness. 

Finally, the coaches return, and told us our events. I was told I was running the coed-sprint medley, and doing long jump, but I was still freaking out because I didn’t know what leg of the medley, if I was supposed to be somewhere for long jump, or if the two events ended up overlapping. It all worked out though, and I ended up running the first leg, the one-hundred, of the medley. Then I did long jump. Then of course, after the long day at the track, there was another cramped bus ride back to the high school. One meet down, thirteen to go!