Hi everyone!  My name is Gabriella or Gabby for short.  I am 21 years old and started training to become a contortionist on October 6, 2009.  I was a gymnast (artistic) for 8 years and am still in love with the sport.  I enjoy science and plan on attending a UC for fall 2010 to major in biochemistry or forensic chemistry. 

I am still living at home but that will change once I get accepted (hopefully) to a UC.  I live with my brother and my mom in sunny California.  We have two cats, Araya and Phantom and I have a betta fish whom I call Mr. Fish, because nothing else seems to suit him. 

I wanted to try to get this blog thing seriously going; I have messed around with other blog sites like blogger and tumblr.  I actually really liked tumblr but their system doesn’t allow for comments and seems to be only for quick blurbs anyway.  So I’m trying out Wordpress and we will see how it goes.

Anyway, more about me.  I have always been interested in flexibility but it never really dawned on me that I could be super flexible like contortionists or rhythmic gymnasts until I watched a video of the 3 contortionists from the Cirque du Soleil show ‘Kooza’, along with other amateur contortion videos on YouTube.  I realized that this was what I wanted to be able to do and I have the drive and perseverance from gymnastics to be able to acheive this goal. 

Oh I should tell you, I have a minor back problem.  I went back to gymnastics at age 18 after a 7 year break.  I felt there was something missing in my life and gymnastics filled that void.  Right before competition season I hurt my back, and by the end of practice I couldn’t even lift my legs while hanging from my arms on a bar.  I went to the doctor and it took a few doctors, actually, to figure out what was wrong with me.  I ended up having spondylolisthesis of my L5 (the slipping forward of one vertebrae).  This happens due to weak ’scotty dogs’, or processes that come off the vertebrae.  I then saw a spine specialist in Oakland and he told me that I have had this problem since birth and my L5 is still cartilage (you are born with a cartilagenous skeleton and it gradually becomes bone as you get older).

I was weary to start contortion at first because my back would often hurt if I sat or stood for too long and I didn’t want to hurt it any further.  I then learned that if you make the bend further up the back (closer to the rib cage) it relieves the bend near the L5/sacrum, and it doesn’t hurt me!  You’re supposed to bend like this anyway.  Ever since I started contortion my back is relatively free of pain, unless I move a lot of heavy boxes or sit for way too long, but hey that hurts anyone!