World champion gymnast Morgan Hurd has a new reason to love books: They help her train
A balance beam is just four inches wide. But whether it sits an inch off the floor or the standard four feet, the challenge it poses for elite gymnasts expertly schooled in somersaulting and flipping along its full length is the same.
That's how Morgan Hurd explains it, at least.
"Beam is one of those things that's more mental than anything," she said. "If you can do it on the floor, you can do it on the beam."
That's the approach she is taking as she trains for the postponed Tokyo Olympics in the living room of her Delaware home.
With First State Gymnastics, her training site since fifth grade, shuttered as a precaution during the novel coronavirus pandemic, Hurd has access to just one piece of gymnastics equipment: a modified balanced beam that skims the ground and is roughly half the regulation length of 16 feet, 5 inches. She found a creative way to use literature to help her train, but she has no living-room springboard for launching her 4-foot-9 frame over a vault. And there are no uneven bars in her house or yard for practicing her highflying giants.
No doubt, whenever her gym reopens, the uneven bars will pose the trickiest challenge.
"The hardest thing will be bars just because that feeling is irreplaceable - no matter what you do or how strong you are," Hurd said in a recent telephone interview.
Until then, the 18-year-old, who has done gymnastics since she was 3, knows her sport and her body well enough to realize what she needs to do to stay in contention for a spot on next year's U.S. Olympic team.
With rosters pared from five to four for the Tokyo Games, competing nations will prioritize gymnasts who are fluent on all four apparatuses. That should play into Hurd's hands; at 16, she was the 2017 all-around world champion, and she also claimed a silver medal on beam.
At the 2018 world championships, Hurd joined Simone Biles, who had taken 2017 off from competition following her dominance at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, to lead the U.S. women to team gold. Hurd claimed silver on floor and bronze in the all-around.
Hurd said she welcomed the International Olympic Committee's decision to postpone the Games by a year despite the monumental disruption in the training regimens of the competitors.
"I thought it was the best decision," she said. "It wouldn't have been fair, and it would have been dangerous to expect athletes to be in peak shape in such a short period of time."
Assuming the Tokyo Games begin July 23, 2021, as now planned, the postponement won't disrupt Hurd's college plans. Home-schooled by her mother, Sherri, who adopted her at 11 months in Wuzhou, China, Hurd graduated in June and in November signed her letter-of-intent to attend Florida with fellow U.S. national team member Riley McCusker.
Hurd initially deferred enrollment until 2020, after the Olympics. But even before the Games were postponed, she pushed the start of her freshman year back further, until spring 2022, in hopes of competing at the 2021 world championships.
These days, Hurd's self-directed training regimen consists of two workouts daily - three hours in the morning, another two hours in the afternoon - six days a week. She is in regular touch with the coach she has worked with since fifth grade, Slava Glazounov. Hurd is in charge of her conditioning routine - the stretches, core work and exercises that maintain her strength and flexibility.
Glazounov, a former Russian national team member, gives assignments to keep her aerials, turns and leaps sharp. Using a propped-up cellphone, Hurd shoots video of her practices and emails it for his critique.
"We just kind of text back and forth, and he gives me assignments and things I should be working on," she said.
Equally important to Hurd is staying in touch with her teammates on the U.S. national team - especially close friend Sunisa Lee, who last month shared a video of a front aerial that ended with a splat in the her family's yard.
"That was pretty funny!" Hurd said. "We talk a lot over Snapchat pretty much daily, but we don't talk about gymnastics daily. I think we're all kind of helping each other keep in contact, outside of the people that are inside of our houses."
An avid reader, Hurd has used her newfound time to catch up on chores, such as cleaning her car top-to-bottom, and trying to learn Chinese online. She has had three elbow surgeries, so this is not the first stretch in which she hasn't been able to practice full-go. But being shut out of her gym is something else entirely.
"I'm used to coming back from elbow surgery," Hurd said. "They were quick recoveries. I was in the gym and able to do beam, and I could twist and jump on trampolines. This is very different."
