That first video, "Backyard Gymnast," established the crucial elements of a Mikenastics video. An hour long, broken into segments featuring Geronsin doing different routines and trying to break records (records being the top number of successful attempts in twenty-five tries), each filmed from a single angle.
Sometimes it’s a lonely-looking shot, a little voyeuristic, the camera set across the room or the yard, shaking sometimes when Geronsin comes down hard from a vault or floor routine. It’s what Geronsin wants, the solitude, the lack of distractions. "I’ve been my own coach, I’ve been my own camera man, I’ve been my own performer, I’ve been my own cheerleader. This is myself, you know?"
When the first Mikenastics aired in early 2002, a funny thing happened: Geronsin got fan mail. Just a few emails a day but steady, and not from who he expected, which was, say, a guy in his 50s inspired to start exercising. Most mail came from college kids and twentysomethings who raved about the program, declared Mikenastics the best thing on television, requested their favorite routines for upcoming episodes.
Geronsin doesn’t understand the attention and doesn’t try to, but it nevertheless drove him to continue releasing Mikenastics episodes, one a year or so. The observer effect is noticeable in newer episodes—he talks to the camera between attempts, makes jokes, there’s music in the background, and Mikenastics 5: "Staying Alive" features a lengthy discussion between Mikenastics and a fake interviewer (he played both characters). But it works and makes the episodes, already curiously entertaining simply because Geronsin is both earnest and talented, even more alluring.
Geronsin sends his episodes to practically every Minnesota public-access network. Mikenastics is currently broadcast on twelve networks in over sixty cities, making it quite possibly—assuming potential audience, anyway—the biggest public-access show in the state. But he’s not seeking fame. Advancing the Mikenastics brand and his public image, replying to all that fan mail, thinking up new activities for episodes—lately he’s introduced stilts, long-distance basketball shooting, and the limbo-—is simply an extension of the original hobby.
Geronsin lives a quiet life. He works as a maintenance man for an apartment complex in nearby Blaine, tinkers with old cars, watches old movies, listens to old records, hangs out with his girlfriend. He hates change. He’s never lived outside Coon Rapids, and the development he lives in was built on a field on which he and his high school buddies used to throw keggers. He’s a decade into gymnastics and wants to be at it until he’s a hundred.
"I like to think of my own life as an anchor; stop, hold it, everything is good right here, right now. What are we racing towards? Where are we going? Most people don’t even know that, but they’re going fast. I’m a stick in the mud. Life is supposed to be this flowing stream, and everybody’s going with the flow. Well, I’m on the banks stuck in the mud, and everyone else is going by."
One time last summer on the high bar he swung up and once his feet pointed skyward everything instantly felt perfect, as if gravity and time had stopped, and he stayed there for three, four, five seconds before swinging back down and dismounting, planting his feet back on earth. A new record. You see on the grainy videotape that he can hardly contain himself, he’s so happy. He’s smiling and chuckling to himself like the moment won’t ever end. "So super duper!" he says.
He stuck it. A ten, right there.
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