Beautiful on the Outside by Adam Rippon

Author:Adam Rippon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Adventures of a Skating Raisin

At that same Thanksgiving dinner, another fortuitous thing happened—I met Bianca’s new boyfriend, Denis. He was a professional ice skater and her co-star in Disney On Ice. I was excited to meet him because she had been talking him up for months about how nice he was to her. And I had seen the Instagram pictures, and this guy was like a Ukrainian Adonis with 0 percent body fat. I needed to see this in real life.

After Thanksgiving dinner, as we were talking about what the hell was going on with my life, Bianca had an idea.

“You should train with Denis,” she said. “He will whip your butt right into shape.”

“I don’t know,” I told her.

“What is the worst that can happen?” she said. “You have about two months until nationals. What have you got to lose?” I had already been on the floor of Eleven, so she was right.

I agreed to let Denis train me, and for a cold Ukrainian, he was pumped. “Let’s do this!” he said like someone who knew they were about to introduce me to a world of hurt. We high-fived, and my fate was sealed.

We met down the street from my house—there is a track there that is attached to a school, which means we didn’t have to pay to be there. (A bargain!) Denis showed up with a bunch of hurdles he had made himself out of pipes. Was I about to become a track star? Was I about to become the next Allyson Felix, except not as pretty and slower? But these weren’t like full-size track-and-field hurdles—some were shorter and some were taller. They were maybe about two to four feet off the ground and looked like half-finished contraptions he stole from Home Depot. Still, I had no clue what was going to happen.

Denis had me jumping over the hurdles in all sorts of drills. I’d face the hurdles and jump over them with both feet, then I would jump over them all with just one foot and then on the other foot, then I would jump over the hurdles sideways to the left, and then I would jump over the hurdles sideways to the right. It was the hardest I had ever worked out in my life. At the end of the first session, I thought Denis was going to see me either die or puke, or die and then puke right there next to one of his homemade Frankenstein hurdles.

As he was loading up everything into the car (I did not die or puke), he said to me, “You just need to dry out.”

“Dry out?” I asked him. I was confused. Did he think I was wet?

“No, no,” he said, in his thick Ukrainian accent. “Like a grape. You’re too juicy. We are going to dry you out. You need to be like a raisin.”

I still wasn’t entirely sure what he meant, but I was pretty sure that he was about the hundredth former Soviet to call me fat in my lifetime.

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