They don’t know what to expect, and why would they, they’re just passing by with dogs or strollers on this sleepy Coon Rapids sidewalk, and out of nowhere a stout bald man wearing nothing but cutoff jeans or tight shorts comes bolting down the side yard, throws his hands forward, leaps toward a padded sawhorse, and, if all goes well, flips up and lands on his feet.
They stop, some of them, cheer him on, call out that he should be in the Olympics. Cars slow down or honk, and more than once they’ve circled the block and stopped to watch some more. Because who can help it, watching this middle-aged man launch himself at homemade gymnastics apparatuses, and actually, as it turns out (if they watch long enough), doing it pretty well?
Not that Mike Geronsin notices. Or at least tries not to. He’ll put on headphones and rest for three minutes and then take off again toward the vault and—assuming, again, that all went well, that he flipped up and over and landed on his feet and held the pose for three seconds—he’ll clap his hands and clamp them on his hips, chuckle to himself, peer into an old VHS camera mounted on a tripod, and announce: "That’s a ten right there." Or, "I stuck it."
Twenty-five repetitions—why twenty-five? It’s always just twenty-five—and then on to the next exercise.
Geronsin, better known to the cult following of his public-access shows as Mikenastics, never tried gymnastics until ten years ago, when he was alone in his home for the first time. (The above 1969 photo is just him goofing around on a clothesline bar in the backyard
of his parent’s house.) "Everyone has voids, feel they were deprived of something in their earlier years," he says. "At forty-three, the youngest of my three kids moved out. I’ve been through two marriages that failed. You get to my age and you start thinking to yourself, ‘now what, where do I go now?’ You start recalling what you enjoyed in your previous life, and for me, that was gymnastics."
It wasn’t so much something he enjoyed as it was an absence he regretted. In high school, after acing routines in gym class, he was asked to join the gymnastics team. But his wrestling coach talked him out of it, and Geronsin never had another chance: He dropped out after his sophomore year.
So there he was, a quarter-century later, with an empty house and that void and the nagging idea that even though he didn’t like change, he needed to try something new.
He briefly considered buying professional equipment, but it was too intimidating, too polished, too expensive. So he built some. The high bar, steel piping attached to his deck. The basement practice floor, a rubber mat on top of plywood on top of 168 regulation foam squares. The rings attached to his garage rafters, first wood until he broke one and now steel from an industrial supply company. The vault, a sawhorse wrapped in Styrofoam, the poleless pole vault, a mini trampoline and a bamboo bar set on sticks anchored by tires, the balance beam, a slab of wood on top of two stools, and so on.
He sized everything for indoors because he couldn’t bear waiting out winter, and besides, he had that space to fill. For the poleless pole vault routine, for instance, Geronsin sprints from an upstairs bedroom down the hallway and into the living room, where he leaps on the trampoline and dives over the bamboo bar.
He developed a personal scoring system. Seven for completing the exercise, and a point for each second, up to three, that he holds the landing. For certain exercises, like rings and the high bar, it’s seven for getting up and ten for holding himself upside down for three seconds. Sometimes he practiced routines a few times a week, sometimes almost daily, rotating them. He loved it. He couldn’t believe he had waited this long to try. He obsessively recorded each routine’s results. The void began to vanish.
Nobody was going to see any of this. Geronsin started recording his practices only so he could critique himself. Then one day his son asked if he could put together a highlight reel and send it off to public access channels, just for fun.
Leave a Reply Cancel reply