The gym tear down went much quicker than anyone expected yesterday. I got there at 8:30am and there were about 6 guys working hard, having already taken down all the uneven bars sets. My first job was to start ripping up the velcro joining strips on the matting between the beams, and then to roll them all up so that they can be reused. The next job was to take the padding off the parallel bars supports and the beam supports. More velcro!
Then there was lots of sweeping of all the floors, as all the mats came up and were stacked. The quantity of old strapping tape, bandaids, hair elastics, bobby pins, scrunchies, chalk dust, I have never seen before! In all we collected 60c in small coins throughout the morning. A 60c cent rebate on the cost of the gym! It won’t go far…
And then there was more ripping up of velcro from the floor apparatus. So much velcro! I was chatting with the head coach, and he asked if I knew where velcro originated from. Yes, NASA. He said they’d invented it to be able to fix things in place in zero gravity. I don’t suppose they realised that it would be so extensively employed in gymnastic equipment in the future. It made me wonder how they ever constructed a gym without it!
With about 15 people – gym staff, coaches, parents and the construction contractor – we had it all done by 10:30am. They had allocated a day and a half to the tear down, and we did it in 3 hours! The floor still needed to be moved, but that will be a slow job for only two people, of carefully undoing bolts, moving sprung floor sections one by one and carefully doing up bolts again, so they didn’t need us for that.
The emptied gym. The sprung floor still to be moved is in the foreground, and the equipment is all stacked to the right. In the background, the pit is all still intact. Thankfully we didn’t have to empty the pit of all the foam blocks – that would have been a horrible job! (The pit is a big hole filled with foam blocks that the gymnasts can vault into, or dismount from bars into. The foam provides a very soft landing.) My daughter’s coach talks of the snakes and spiders that live in the pit. While I’m sure there are no snakes in there, there are certainly spiders, dustmites and many other skin-crawling creepy crawlies!
As I sit here typing this, I’ve realised how sore my torso muscles are, so obviously they got a good workout yesterday! It will be interesting to see the new layout of the gym being constructed over the next two weeks. Each day we arrive for training, there’ll be more to see.
Last night I did some more Schwalm embroidery, working my way through a few more of the openwork motifs. I’ve never done this much drawn thread/pulled thread work before, and I’m really enjoying it. I am quite close to getting through all of the instructions, I think. I haven’t actually read ahead the whole way yet! However, I will only have completed one quarter of the whole design. I’m not sure if that will be sufficient for Luzine’s purposes at this time, so that I can finish it later. I hope so – I have so many other projects to work on!
White Threads is the blog of Yvette Stanton, the author, designer, publisher behind Vetty Creations' quality needlework books and embroidery products.
Maybe they weren’t expecting quite so many energetic, willing helpers for the tear-down?
May I suggest a quiet day of embroidery while the torso recovers?
Maybe they weren’t! And I will see what I can do about the quiet day of embroidery receovery, but I’m not sure it will be possible! 🙂