I want to go to college, obviously go to London and just kind of figure out the rest of my life.
— Shawn Johnson
I fell in love with running, and I finally have time to do it now.
My knee is almost back to normal. I am back in training.
I have a chaperone everywhere I go - my mom.
I get less and less sleep these days, so when I have any down time all I want to do is sleep!
I pay attention to my diet to be a healthier gymnast, but I'm not obsessive over it.
I started taking gymnastic classes when I was 3 years old.
I missed being considered an athlete and having that competitive drive, and missed having something to work for every day. I'd taken two and a half years away from the sport and was out of shape. I wanted to get back to where I was in 2008.
It sounds funny, but the 2008 Olympics were something that just kind of happened, and I was lucky they came at a point when I was uninjured and well prepared. As a gymnast, you can't ask for much more.
I was at the Olympic Games winning medals and I still doubted my image. I doubted what I looked like. That's sad.
My parents- they've been my biggest influences and supporters since day one. They teach me every day that happiness comes from within and not from something outside of your heart.
I was able to do Classics, the U.S. national championships and the Pan American Games and feel like I improved with each meet, but I was still struggling with a lot of residual pain from the two surgeries.
I always feel like I'm the young one, I'm the small one.
In some ways the ACL tear was a blessing. I had hesitated to return to elite gymnastics after the 2008 Olympics. I told myself I had already accomplished so much, and the road was just going to get harder if I continued.
I told myself after 2008 that I was done for good. But they say you can't keep a gymnast away from her sport.
I had surgery to repair the ACL in February 2010 and was back in the gym by June, but rushed things too quickly and ended up re-tearing my MCL in September.
I have a lot of expectations and a lot of goals I want to fulfill, but the biggest dream is still to make the Olympic team for London.
It's been strange and weird watching the other girls at the U.S. Olympic trials just because I was training to be out there myself.
Retiring was scary and it was tough to give up gymnastics, but so many great opportunities have come from it that I never expected.
Gymnastics is so complex.
I have a healthy lifestyle, but there's nothing you can really do to prevent from rolling an ankle or something like that.
Every year I just kept going back to gymnastics, but I didn't start out training 10 hours a day. When I turned 10 or 11, I got more serious and I focused a lot on making it to the elite level, and from there I just kept going.
A typical practice consists of practicing every event for about an hour. A lot of people assume I have private coaching, but I work out with 13 other girls at the gym!
I don't want to be all power and muscle.
Staying healthy and consistent is paramount.
When I was younger, my coach, Liang Chow, made all the decisions. I would go to the gym for practice, do exactly what Chow told me to do, go home, come back and start all over again. If Chow told me to do 50 squat jumps, I did 50 squat jumps.
We're taught at such a young age that you can always be better and that you're never perfect and that you're never good enough.
The body is an amazing machine... If you eat the right things your body will perform incredibly well!
I've never had a teammate competing with me my whole life.
I'm trying to stay as calm as possible and focus one day at a time, but when reality sets in, I feel everything: anxiety, excitement, nerves, pressure and joy.
Of course, when you're training your whole life to get to the Olympics, you train for gold.
I'm pleased to say my knee feels a lot better. It's still not back to normal, and I don't know if it ever will be, but I'm learning to deal with it instead of expecting it to be like it was before.
I started from zero and went back to the basics in gymnastics.
After 13 years of hard landings in gymnastics, one ski run had delivered the biggest injury of my career.
I love lean meats like chicken, turkey. I'm obsessed with sushi and fish in general. I eat a lot of veggies and hummus.
Something my mom taught me when I was little is that everything happens for a reason.
Everything is about your movements and precision and timing, which is what gymnastics is about.
I think about my goals. There were a lot of times in gymnastics when I really didn't want to go in and train, but you can't make it to the Olympics if you don't train!
When I was 3 my parents put me in gymnastics because I was a bundle of energy and they just didn't know what to do with me! They put me in a Tots class and I just fell in love with it.
I usually work out 4 hours a day during the week and 5 to 6 hours on Saturday, with Sundays off.
I'm doing four hours of gymnastics training a day, six days a week and then an extra two to three hours in a fitness center as well.
My approach to gymnastics in Beijing was heavily based on the amount of difficulty I could do.
My coach, Liang Chow, had one rule while I was training for the 2008 Olympics: no skiing. I could do anything I wanted outside the gym, he said, except ski.
People put too much emphasis on looks.
I live for Pilates reformer class. I go at least three times a week. It's a great way to lengthen your muscles, stretch, and kind of relax your mind.
I didn't make it a priority, and as a result my knee didn't heal to the extent it should have.
I know how much more I need to do to be where I want.
I need to learn how to face challenges.
I had a constant fear, a constant little doubt in my mind: 'OK, I'm getting ready to do my standing back full on beam and I might re-tear my ACL.'
With literature, sometimes a book is presented in the media as being say, a Muslim story or an African story, when essentially it's a universal story which we can all relate to it, no matter what race or social background we come from.
