I grew up in Oklahoma. My sister and I went to a gym five minutes down the road. That was the first one that called my parents back when they called out of the telephone book. I fell in love. From the first moment I walked in, you couldn’t get me out of there.
I was 9 when I competed at my first state competition. It’s funny, because I actually wanted to compete the year before. My coach had said, ‘You’re not ready.’ And I was so bummed. But looking back, it’s one of those things. You don’t always make the team. You don’t always make the cut. You’re not always ready, but things will happen when they’re supposed to happen.
My goal growing up was not to win an Olympic gold medal. My goal was to get to the next step. Can I qualify for state? Once that happened, can I qualify for regionals? OK, well now, can I make the national team? It was just this stairstep to get to that eventual goal: Can I make the Olympic team?
It was the day before April Fool’s Day. March 31, 1992. I was training so hard leading up to the Olympic trials. This was my first opportunity to try to qualify for the Olympic Games. That night, in practice, I fell on an uneven bar dismount and broke and dislocated my left elbow. In that moment, you think, ‘What did I just do?’
My coach wrapped my arm up and drove me to the hospital. I went into surgery that night, and they put a screw in to hold the bone together. I was being wheeled out the next morning, still not believing what had just happened, and my coach met me at the door. He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘All right, looks like we have some work to do. I’ll see you in the gym tomorrow.’
I ended up winning the Olympic trials, which is crazy. I look back at that time, and I understand the lesson in it. I was not the strongest athlete, the most talented, the most flexible. I was the scrappy one. I had to work harder than anyone else. I understood that very clearly from a very early age. I was just going to be relentless in my work ethic. I came back a stronger, more well-rounded athlete.
The first people we saw when we walked into the Olympic Village (in 1992 in Barcelona) was the ‘Dream Team’ (the 1992 U.S. Olympic men’s basketball team). I had watched these guys growing up, and they were so nice. Because we were all Americans, and we were the shortest and they were the tallest, they put their arms around us and were like, ‘OK, we’re all in this together. Let’s go get ‘em.’
In 1993, I won the gymnastics world championship. The summer after, I went through a tough time. I really thought about quitting gymnastics. My coaches forced me to think about why. It was about not having a new goal. I had done the Olympics. I had done world championships. For a gymnast, I didn’t know what was next. No one had really done two Olympics in the U.S. It was an unspoken thing. I hadn’t wrapped my mind around going to the next Olympics until my coach said, ‘Hey, why not?’
It’s the same four events and the same routine. You learn to take this huge perspective — all these people watching — and you dial it into, ‘OK, I’ve done this routine 1,000 times. Now, my job is not to think about the bigger picture, but to simply think about the next 90 seconds.’
We all have those times where we get negative thoughts. You may hear them at the gym, or you may just think them to yourself. I learned early to stop those the moment they start to creep in. I would immediately think of two positive things to offset that negative comment that was floating around in my head.
It wasn’t really about the gold medals as much as this amazing feeling to perform what you know you can do when you need to. For me, the feeling of a stuck landing, of performing a routine up to your capabilities, up to what you know you have been able to do in the gym each day — for me, the gold medals are just symbols of those moments. That’s the icing.
I’ll never forget that moment of, ‘Wow, as a little girl from Oklahoma, I get to go out and represent my country internationally.’ It was just such an amazing thing.
(After the Olympics), I knew I had to make some changes. I needed to challenge myself. Being healthy, being physically active, having good nutrition. Those are important to gymnastics when I had a goal to train for, but they have to be important in life, too. So, I started to research. It wasn’t like now, where you can look online and have a thousand different plans at your fingertips. You had to figure it out. That’s how I started this focus on making women’s health a priority.
I remember walking into my first gym, and I left because I was so intimidated by all the machines. Here I am, this athlete, and I’m intimidated to walk in a gym. So, I created books and workouts for people to throw in their bag, go to the gym, and if they get intimidated, just turn to the next page and do that workout. Then you’ve done something.
That summer (in 2010), I launched my company (Shannon Miller Worldwide) devoted to health and wellness. I was hosting a radio show. Toward the end of the year, I saw I was going to be out of town during my next scheduled (doctor’s appointment). I called the office, thinking, ‘I’ll push this off.’ I can still feel the weight in my chest of feeling that I was not walking the walk. I was not doing the thing that I was asking of others.
When the receptionist came on the line, I explained the scheduling conflict. She said, ‘Can you come in this morning?’ I was looking at my to-do list, thinking, ‘No,’ but the words out of my mouth said, ‘Yes.’ And so I did. That morning, in the span of a 15-minute visit, I got the shock of my life. I had a baseball-sized cyst on my left ovary. It was weeks of tests and scans. By January, I was waking up from surgery to find out that it was a rare form of ovarian cancer.
There is strength in not only accepting help, but also in asking for help when needed. As I travel the country and talk to survivors everywhere, that’s one of the most common things. We don’t want to bother anyone. But what I learned from being a caregiver for my mother, who’s a two-time survivor, and then from being a patient, is that we are not alone. You do not have to do this alone.