Colorado Springs World Team Training Camp
July 19, 2011 | 
Author I made it back from Baku safely, and for the past week I have been in training camp in Colorado Springs. In Baku, I won my first match against the Georgian and lost my second match to the Turk. I felt safe in a position where I obviously wasn’t because he turned me, and as a result, I lost the match. It was a good trip though, and I am glad that I went. It makes me hungry to compete again in August as we prepare for the world championships in Turkey.
Training camp has been going great. There are several foreign teams out here as well as some very tough competition in my weight class. This morning I had a minor set back with a minor injury, but I will be back at it in a day or two. It is interesting how much training goes into staying healthy at this stage of my career. There are some workouts that I do just so that I can stay healthy to compete.
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Tags: colorado springs, Justin Ruiz, olympic wrestling, world team training camp | 
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I Am Still In Baku. Check Out The Caspian Sea!
Having missed our bus to take us into the city, Jordan and I find a way to kill some time checking out the beach front of the Caspian Sea. There were a couple of times when we thought we were being sneaky and venturing into private beaches, but it turned out that they were the public beaches. The private beach that we have at our hotel is dead, and no one is doing anything there. It isn’t like if there were a lot of people there that we could interact with them anyway because we don’t speak their language. It’s too bad I don’t have a portable translator that we all could talk into that would translate our languages for each other. Oh well maybe there will be something like that for my kids generation.
Only a couple more days until competition time. I am getting excited to wrestle. It should be a great and competitive wrestling tournament this weekend.
It Is Hot In Baku Azerbaijan
I am in Baku, Azerbaijan and it is ridiculously hot here. The accommodations here are pretty nice, and I am excited for the tournament this weekend. One thing that I am really impressed about is the size of their wrestling facility that we have trained at for the past couple of days. There are 14 full size wrestling mats that they house in their wrestling room. I have never seen a wrestling room that big before. They also have a nice weight room and locker room facilities right next to the wrestling room. I am amazed that their wrestling program is so well funded. It is like a real professional sports team. I hope that someday wrestling in the U.S with have similar facilities for the Olympic level athletes. The Olympic training center is very nice, but here in Azerbaijan they take it to a whole new level.
The actual competition gets started with weigh ins on Saturday, and then we will be competing on Sunday. Usually the weight classes will be divided and wrestled on a pair of different days, however, for this tournament they will be keeping all of the weight classes together and competing on the same day. There will be a lot of very tough wrestlers who will be competing in this tournament, and it will definitely be a good preparation for the World Championships later in the fall.
I don’t think that it will be much of a challenge to make weight here being that the it is so hot. I like to get out and do things, but it is just so hot here that I much prefer to hang out in my hotel room and enjoy the nice air conditioning. That is one amenity that I am extremely grateful for. Thank you so much tournament organizing committee.
Posted in Traveling and Competitions | Tags: baku azerbaijan, golden grand prix, greco roman wrestling, hot, Justin Ruiz, olympic wrestling | No Comments »
A Man, A Dream, and A Mountain
I recently spent the weekend in South Dakota touring the Black Hills. I had a great time despite the very long drive to and from my destination. My wife and I had planned on leaving early Friday morning, but my daughters didn’t want to sleep. Instead of fighting with them to go to bed we loaded them in the car and started our trek to South Dakota a little earlier than planned. We made it to Rawlins, WY and got a room to sleep in for a few hours before we finished our journey to the Black Hills. By the time that we arrived we were all exhausted, and I was really doubting our ability the following morning to be able to take the 9 hour bus tour through the Black Hills like we had planned. Morning came, and we were on our way to Ft. Hayes where we would begin our expedition.
We saw Mt. Rushmore, pig tail bridges, national forest, wildlife, and some natural wonders. For me the highlight of the tour came when we visited the Crazy Horse Memorial. I watched a video about a man, a dream, and a mountain, and I couldn’t help but feel inspired after I learned a little more about the man who had started carving away at the mountain decades ago. Korczak Ziolkowski was a very determined man who did not allow anything to stop him from working on his dream. He dedicated the last part of his life carving away at a mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota to honor Crazy Horse, a Native American hero. There is a short film that plays at the theater inside of the center, and when I watched it, I was so impressed with what Korczak did.
When Korczak started carving away at the mountain it was just himself and a few tools that he had to haul up the mountain himself. He had very limited resources at the time, but he didn’t let that stop him. He would trek up and down the mountain every day carrying heavy tools and drilling equipment with him up a sequence of stairs that he had to construct before he could even attempt getting up the mountain. Sometimes when his compressor that would keep his drill boring would cut out, he would have to go back down the mountain, wind it up again, and climb back up the mountain so that he could pick up where he had left off. I can’t imagine how tedious that would be day in and day out for years and years. Obviously as the project progressed he was able to gain some more support and assistance, but still he didn’t live to see the completion of his project. In fact, the project will probably take decades more to be completed, but what he was able to accomplish is impressive to say the least.
There are a couple of lessons that I gleaned from this man’s story that I believe will be helpful to me as well as anyone that can apply them to their particular circumstances.
1. You have to start: This sounds simple enough, and any sane person might ask “Why would you even include this? Of course you need to start. How can you finish if you never start?” That is exactly my point. How many people have dreams of doing something, but they never even give themselves the chance to make it happen because they never start. People want to get in great shape, but they don’t want to have to spend that first embarrassing day in the gym. People want to start a business, but they never pursue that first customer. Heck, people want to win the lottery, but they won’t even go buy a ticket. They dream of all of these things without ever taking a chance and putting a foot forward. Of course you can’t finish unless you start so get started on your project.
2. The work will be challenging at times: I am sure that hauling a drill up a mountain is hard. Carving a huge Indian and a horse out of a mountain is definitely a challenge. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that whatever you are trying to do is going to be easy. It will be hard, but finding the way to overcome challenges despite their difficulty is what makes you strong and it’s what makes you a winner. Don’t psych yourself out of doing something just because you think that what you want to do is hard because after you are done with it you will be glad that you finished it.
3. You can find a way to get the resources you need: A lot of people fail at starting things because they feel that they lack the necessary resources to make it happen. You may temporarily lack the resources, but if you see point number 1 and get started, the resources will become available. You always have something that you can do. Korczak was very clever in using the resources that he had. He needed money to keep the work going on Crazy Horse so he started charging people to come watch him work. It was like the mountain needed money and work so he started the work and the money came and found him. If there is something that you really want to do, start doing it and you will find the resources.
I am sure that there are many other lessons that you could learn from this man’s story as you look at all that he did, but for now these three that I have listed have really inspired me. If you get a chance make sure to take the time to look into this man’s story a little bit. It is very intriguing.
These two videos are part of the introduction at the Crazy Horse Memorial. The first one starts pretty slow. I recommend skipping the first couple of minutes until the narrator starts talking.
Coaching Makes You Better
Have you ever learned something before and at the time that you learn it you think to yourself “I really need to make sure that I remember this.”? I have done that time and time again in my life, but I don’t always remember to follow through and do the thing that I wanted to. Well last night I was reminded of one of those things, coaching makes you better. I would say that when you are coaching wrestling that it makes you a better wrestler, and I think that is true, but I would go as far to say that coaching anything in your particular field or area of expertise will help you to improve in that particular field. When you are teaching someone else what they are supposed to be doing, it is easier to see how sometimes maybe you have gotten away from the basics and you need to refocus. All of the questions that students have also help you to see that maybe there are other options to what you are teaching.
For example, I started teaching wrestling classes on Wednesday and Saturday at the University of Grappling in Lindon, Utah, and I must say that I think that it is making me a better wrestler. Not only am I forced to focus more on the basics of wrestling, but I am getting a lot of questions to make me think more about what it is that I am doing while I am out on the mat. In fact, I have even learned some new moves while I have been teaching my students. So does that make me the teacher or the student? I have also started really going through my mind to think of the best systematic way to teach my students about the sport and how different techniques can benefit them. This thinking paired with my search for new technique from other sources as well has really led to an improvement in my own skills.
Having the opportunity to teach others truly is a blessing. I have known that teaching helps you refine your own skills and now that I have learned that lesson again, I will definitely need to continue to apply it. I will definitely continue to teach throughout my wrestling career. In terms of the knowledge and skill refinement that I will obtain from it, I can’t afford not to. So if you want to get better at something, or even gain a better understanding of it, make sure to go teach someone. You will benefit from the experience guaranteed.
Posted in Training | Tags: greco roman wrestling, Justin Ruiz, olympic wrestling, teaching, wrestling class, wrestling technique | No Comments »
Sometimes You Just Have To Start
It is easy to wait. It’s easy to think that you don’t have enough experience, or you don’t have enough knowledge, or you don’t have the right tools, or it’s just going to be too hard, but really those are all excuses. You can start right now today and start working towards your goal or something that you want to accomplish. I’m not saying that I don’t make excuses too because I do. I’m human. But, I do know that when I get to work on something and accomplish the task that I set to do, I feel so much better for having accomplished it. It makes me feel like I’ve won something, and I guess I have. Whenever you accomplish a goal or task no matter how small you are beating your lazy self. You know the one that I’m talking about. The slow, lazy, I’ll get to it tomorrow guy that shows up every now and then. If you can beat that guy, you can beat anything.
I was thinking about this because I finally took the time to put together a little video of some of my wrestling. I’ve been meaning to do it for a long time, and I guess this time I had a little more motivation. I put it together so that I can use it for speeches or clinics as well as for courting potential sponsors. Writers, photographers, and designers all have portfolios. I guess that you could say that this is a small part of my greco roman wrestling portfolio. When it came down to it, actually making the video took a few days of effort, but it was fun. I’m not a professional videographer, and I didn’t have Sony Vegas (awesome video software) to make it, so I just used what I had, and I’m happy with the results I got. It was actually a lot of fun, and I think that I will try some more video in the future.
So next time when the lazy guy in your head is telling you that you can’t do it because it is too hard, or you’re not smart enough, or you don’t have all of the tools, tell him to shut up and do that thing that you want to. You will feel better about yourself, and you will have something new, something that you can add to your life’s portfolio.
Posted in Training | Tags: greco roman wrestling, Justin Ruiz, olympic wrestling, wrestling, wrestling technique | No Comments »
My Dad Is Awesome
I believe that the fastest way to gain appreciation for someone and what they do is to try to spend a little time in their shoes and to attempt to do what they do. I say this because as soon as I became a father, I found a renewed and even greater respect for my father. Parenting is tough work, and babies aren’t delivered with manuals so it is a challenge to provide the necessities of survival to your children as well as try to guide and teach them in a way that they will be beneficial to the rest of society. There are some things that I really admire about my dad, and when I reflect on my childhood there are a few things that he did for me that really stand out. My dad is awesome!
My dad loves horses, and he is an amazing horse trainer. One year he was even a world champ, and I wish I understood that better as a kid. Now as I am striving to be a world champ I realize the price of being the best at a very elite level. With my dad’s love of horses also came a lot of responsibility to care for them and train them. The horses also came with mountains of crap, literally, that needed to be removed from their stalls on a regular basis. My dad’s solution to this was to employ my brothers and I to clean it all up. He paid us to do it, but looking back he really could have just made us do it for free so I am grateful that we were compensated for our efforts. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was really teaching us the value of work, and I’m very grateful that he did. Standing in the mire of a horse on a hot summer day and loading it into wheel barrows and then driving it up a ramp into a pickup is hard work. The wheel barrows would get heavy with the crap, wet hay, and wet shavings, and if you weren’t careful going up the ramp it was easy to spill it which would slow you down because you obviously had to clean it up. Then we would have to take the pickup down to an open field where we would have to manually scoop out everything that we had filled into the pickup. This process took hours to clean all of the stalls when it was summer time being the busiest because of the volume of horses my dad trained, and in the winter time the hours still seemed long because it was freezing outside. Eventually the process would be simplified to us emptying the wheel barrows at my grand father’s manure pile next door where he would load a dump truck with a tractor, but the manual labor helped me to push through other challenges as I grew up. It was good work for a young man to do.
My dad is also a good story teller even if he does keep telling some of the same ones. When I was a kid I loved when my dad would tell us stories about his adventures growing up and working on a ranch in Arizona. It was a whole new world with wild pig fighting dogs and rattlesnakes. I heard about the pranks that he would play on his siblings growing up and about all of the family pets. I was fascinated that there were rattlesnakes in some of his stories, and I wished that we lived in Arizona so that we could see rattlesnakes yet at the same time I think that if I would have seen one I would have been scared to death of it. His life growing up seemed about as exciting as it could to a little boy like me. His stories led to me spending hours imagining that our dogs would chase down wild pigs, and I would go looking under rocks around the house hoping that a rattlesnake would be under one of them. Luckily for me there never was.
My dad also made sure that we would spend time together as a family. On Sundays we would go to church together as a family, and later in the evening we would do something known to other LDS Church members as Family Home Evening. Basically the family gets together reads an uplifting spiritual message and plays games together. Also in the summers, Wednesdays were the days my dad would take off from the horses and we would go do something fun together like going to a water park or a movie. It was a lot of fun, and I’m glad we were able to do that together as a family. After I had started wrestling, my dad also began driving a school bus. Whenever he could he would put in to drive my high school team to the different wrestling meets and he would drive the whole team to the tournament or dual meet wherever it would be. There was even one tournament that we were at that someone had parked too close to the bus and it would have been impossible for him to pull out of the lot without damaging both the car and the bus. He rallied the wrestling team to move the car. We all got out of the bus and lifted this car out of the way so that he could pull the bus out of the lot and we could be on our way. He would also take hours out of his busy schedule to spend all day in a hot stinky gym to come watch me wrestle even if he wasn’t the one assigned to drive the team.
One of the things that I most now admire about my dad is that he doesn’t seem to get too stressed out about things. I really like that. As a young parent I have found myself seriously stressing out about stuff from kids crying and dirty diapers to realizing that I will need to pay for at least two little girls’ weddings at some point in the future. My wife says I have OCD when it comes to certain things, and I think that she may be right. I think having the trait of being able to focus very intently and specifically on small details has help me to be successful in wrestling, but at the same time it makes other aspects of life difficult like peppers needing to be sliced in a certain way when they go into stir fry or it causes me anxiety. I know it sounds crazy, and that might be because I am a little crazy, but I think that’s okay. Anyway I don’t see a whole lot of things that can stress out my dad. In fact, there are plenty of times when he tells me about stressful situations like parents of kids on his bus route who try to get him in trouble or fired just because he tells rowdy kids to lower their voice, sit down, and face forward. That would really stress me out, but my dad can relax and laugh about it. He doesn’t seem to take anything personal and can just keep doing his job without worrying about it.
Being a parent isn’t easy, and in a world where there are plenty of fathers who walk away from their families and children I am glad that my dad was and is around when I need him. I look at a lot of emotional problems that tend to come up with people in their lives, and I think a lot of those problems and issues are daddy issues. Strong and loving fathers are very important to keeping our families and society together. I really hope that I can be an awesome dad, just like my dad.
Posted in Personal | Tags: cleaning horse stalls, daddy issues, greco roman wrestling, Justin Ruiz, my dad is awesome, wrestling | No Comments »
My Very First Dual Meet
I would write about my very first competition wrestling match, but honestly I don’t remember it at all. I remember that I wrestled my first competition wrestling match at a tournament at Skyline High School in Utah, and that I won the tournament. In the finals I wrestled a pretty strong kid, which I myself was pretty strong. Years of cleaning horse stalls, hoisting hay bales, as well as being an early bloomer helped to provide me with some physical tools that most jr. high kids in my weight class did not have. I also remember that after the conclusion of my final match that my lungs burned more than I thought was humanly possible. In fact had I not won that match, I may have quit the sport altogether because it was so physically painful, but the sense of accomplishment that came with the victory helped to fuel the fire that would keep me going until the present day. But, back to my very first dual meet.
The very first dual meet that I wrestled in was a home meet, which you think most people would be happy about. You get to wrestle at home with all of your friends and family there cheering you on in a comfortable and familiar location. I hated the fact that we were going to be wrestling at home in front of people that knew me. I had to squeeze into a tight singlet that made me feel uncomfortable and self conscious. Even though I was starting to grow out of my fat stage I still looked a little soft, but luckily for me every body at that age at that weight class did too. The worst part about wrestling a home meet was that I was scared to death of facing my opponent for that match. It wasn’t that he was some well known wrestler that had won any big tournaments, but it was something that I thought was much worse. You see he was the coach’s son, and I thought that meant instant death for me the moment that I were to shake hands with him in the center of the mat before we started to wrestle. To add to my discomfort I had met a couple of the wrestlers from his Bennion Jr. High team. Chad and Adam had both been wrestling for a while and they looked like wrestlers. They had won plenty of tournaments, and they were a grade above me. Adam had huge muscular legs, and I thought that for sure the coach’s son would outshine every one on his team mates in every possible combination of athleticism, strength, speed and technique. I was so nervous and so scared that I became physically ill. I went into the locker room, which luckily for me was empty, and I started throwing up. As I vomited, I tried to calm myself down by thinking that there really wasn’t a possibility that he could actually kill me on the mat, but my body didn’t believe the trickery that I was trying to use against it and I kept puking.
When I had successfully finished emptying my guts, I went back out into the gymnasium to await the horrible fate that must be coming. Luckily for me though, the monster that I had created in my head wasn’t quite so intimidating as I had made him out to be. Actually after I did see him, I was pretty confident that I was going to win the match. He was pretty chubby and when he was warming up he looked pretty inexperienced from what I could tell, and with that being said with me being a novice and thinking someone else looked awkward that was really saying something. Even though he wasn’t quite the wrestler that I had imagined I was still a little nervous before we wrestled. I really wanted to be able to win especially in front of all of my friends that had come to the meet. Most of you know how mean kids can be when they are making fun of their friends or even worse making fun of kids who aren’t their friends. I didn’t want to go through that.
Finally it was my turn to wrestle. I stepped out onto the wrestling mat, shook my opponents hand, and we started to wrestle. There wasn’t a very wide variety of techniques that I had at my disposal at the time so I used the first of the two techniques that I had learned, a double leg. I changed levels and tackled my opponent. He didn’t put up much of a fight which quickly made me leading the match by two points. Then I started to use the second move that I had learned, a barbed wire turn. From the top position I reached across his body so that I had both of his arms wrapped up in mine, and I started to walk around his head. Slowly the lock got tighter and tighter until eventually he was on his back, and the referee was slapping the mat signaling a pin. I had won the match! I was so happy that not only had I cheated death, but I had actually beaten the coach’s son as well. The anxiety that I had once had was replaced with a spike of adrenaline and endorphins, and I was extremely glad that I hadn’t given up the match before it had even taken place.
Sometimes the demons that we make up in our head are exponentially greater in size to us than they actually are if we would just actually face them. Sometimes you just have to punch the bully in the mouth to realize that. After that match I was never worried about wrestling the coach’s kid ever again.
Posted in Personal, Training | Tags: greco roman wrestling, Justin Ruiz, my first wrestling match, wrestling competition, wrestling technique | No Comments »
How I Got Started In Wrestling
I really want to become more consistent at writing in my blog so I decided that I will just start telling my story about how I got into this crazy wrestling world and how it has taken me to where I am at today. It has been a really cool journey, and I hope that there are a lot of other adventures to come. But, let me start from the beginning.
I still remember the conversation that I had with my mom when I was a little boy. I was in tears, and I felt like there was absolutely no hope. My younger brother was a good basketball player, my older brother was good at skateboarding, and then there was me, a little fat kid who always got picked last to play any sports at school. At the time, I thought that there was absolutely no hope for me in the athletic realm. I didn’t think that I was good at anything. My mom, however, told me that I was good at a lot of things, but like a lot of kids I thought that she was just saying that because she was my mom and wanted me to feel better about myself. It didn’t work. I eventually stopped crying, but overall I thought that I just sucked.
Fast forward a couple of years. I had started playing Jr. Jazz basketball, the local recreation league, and I wanted to be like Karl Malone and play for the Utah Jazz. I wanted to play in the NBA and be a superstar. I would shoot baskets over at my grandpa’s house and imagine that I was making the game winning shot right at the buzzer. It was fun. The funny thing was that I wasn’t great at basketball, and the basketball team that I played on was horrible. I think that we may have one just one single game the entire season that year. It is funny how you can pick up on things as a kid. I remember now seeing the look of embarrassment and frustration of our coaches, but at the time, I didn’t really understand all of it. By looking at them you never would have guessed that they were even basketball coaches. They were both short white guys, and I don’t even know for sure what they did for a living. Obviously it wasn’t coaching. I think that one of them was a mechanic or liked working on cars at home because he always had grease trapped under his finger nails, and I noticed it when I went to practice. They were both really nice guys, but unfortunately nice didn’t help us to win any games.
That same year that I started playing basketball, my older brother stopped playing basketball. He tried out for the high school team, but he didn’t make the team. He wanted to stay in shape to get ready for the next basketball season so he some how found his way into the wrestling room to stay in shape. I also had some of my friends start wrestling that year, and I really wanted to try it. When wrestling practice was starting up that year at the jr. high, I was in 7th grade, I wanted to go try out for the team. I asked my mom about it and she told me no. My knees had been hurting that year and I had been going to a chiropractor with my parents. Looking back now I think that they hurt just because I was growing, but at the time somehow my mom was telling me that I had bad knees and that I shouldn’t wrestle. My older brother was wrestling, but I don’t think that at the beginning she liked it. I think that she was scared that he would get hurt too. It is funny how things can change over time though. One day she is talking me out of the sport and then later down the road she is cheering like a mad woman in the bleachers. So anyway I didn’t go out for the wrestling team that year. I just went to the wrestling meets that my brother was in, and I would listen to the stories that my friends would tell me about practice and their meets and the hot wrestling manager who was a ninth grader that liked seventh graders. I would just listen, not so much the fat kid anymore, but I still wasn’t good at anything. I was still just the kid who wasn’t good at anything watching on the sidelines.
The next year though I had made up my mind. I knew exactly when wrestling try outs were, and I was definitely going to try out for the team that year. I was determined to go to practice, and I didn’t care what my parents were going to say. I was going to wrestle. The funny thing is the way that I actually went about telling my parents that I was going to wrestle was in a very unlikely setting. Growing up in an LDS (Mormon) home we had the practice of praying together as a family. It was just before bed, and it was time to pray. It just so happened that it was my turn to pray, and as I was saying the prayer I asked God to help me out at wrestling try outs the following day. As soon as I said “Amen.” my mother started asking me what I thought that I was doing by going out to wrestling try outs, and I had bad knees, and I couldn’t and a laundry list of reasons why I wouldn’t be doing it and that was it. She didn’t need two boys out on the mat getting their necks wrenched on. I argued that my brother was wrestling and that it wasn’t fair that I couldn’t be wrestling as well. Luckily for me my dad came to my defense. I don’t think that I ever thanked him for doing that, but now that I am writing I should tell him thank you for making my wrestling career possible. He basically told my mom to lay off and let me wrestle. He didn’t think that it was a big deal, and he thought it would be good for me. I went to bed so excited that night. I was finally going to get a chance at trying out for the wrestling team, and being like my brother, and being like my friends. The hot wrestling manager wouldn’t be around anymore because she had moved on to the high school, but that didn’t really bother me. I was too awkward to talk to any girls anyway, but I was finally getting a shot to wrestle. I had a hard time getting to sleep, but I eventually drifted off away into night time and got some rest before the big day.
The next morning I went to school, and I was really excited. I had my workout clothes, I had a pair of wrestling shoes that I borrowed from my brother, and I was ready. I couldn’t wait to get through classes for the day so that I could finally get on the mat and start wrestling. I don’t know why I thought that I was going to be any good, especially from being so unathletic in the past, but for some reason I thought that I was going to be really awesome at it. When I got to the wrestling room though it was a very different story.
I was a big kid. I was going to be wrestling in the 185 pound class as an eight grader, and there weren’t a whole lot of bigger kids to wrestle with. We wrestled matches that very first day of practice, and I got matched up with a 145 pounder named Jerry. Jerry was American Indian and he was pretty athletic, but with the 40 pound weight advantage I thought that I was going to destroy him. We started wrestling and I tried locking up a move that I had seen my brother do. I wrapped both arms around him and arched backwards to try to throw him. He landed right on top of me and promptly pinned me. When I think back to the move I tried, it really didn’t make any sense for me to try it. When I had seen my brother do the move in competitions it wasn’t exactly what I would call a really successful attack. He would score with it about 50 percent of the time, you might be thinking “Hey 50 percent is a great attack! You should still do it.”, but the problem is that he was getting pinned the other 50 percent of the time. I rolled the dice and I lost. I was so bummed that first day of practice. I was not only not as good as I thought I was going to be, I had gotten pinned by a guy who was 40 pounds lighter than me. Needless to say that it was not a great day of practice, but even with the horrible match I still left the practice room feeling good about life. I was finally part of a real team with friends that I knew, and I finally had a chance to try to get good at something. I went home exhausted but very very happy.
Posted in Personal | Tags: greco roman wrestling, how i got started in wrestling, Justin Ruiz, wrestling team, wrestling try outs | No Comments »
2011 Greco Roman World Team Trials
The 2011 Greco Roman World Team Trials went very well for me, and I am really happy about that. Because of I won the US Open and placed well enough at the world championships last year, I was able to sit out of the challenge tournament and have a bye to the finals where I wrestled the best of three series to John Lorenz of the US Army. I won in two straight matches and made my 6th world team. It is hard to believe that I have been doing this long enough to even make that many world teams. I can’t believe how fast the time goes by, and I assume the older you get the faster it goes even though you are moving slower.
In those two matches that I wrestled I felt pretty good. I honestly can’t say that I worked to score on the feet as much as I would like to, but I wanted to play it safe. There were a couple of things in the back of my mind that really kept me from opening up. Winning the world team trials provides a couple of benefits: insurance for me and my family, and money. However, those aren’t the two motivating factors for me competing. I could make more money doing something else, and I could get insurance other places too. Winning the trials though helps me to not have to stress as much about the two. You would think that with those two things on the line that I would open up and do all that I could to beat my opponent as badly as I could, but I didn’t. I did just what was necessary to win. I didn’t want to open myself up by attacking too much and give him the opportunity to catch me in some fluke move. Oh well it’s over and I won. My next matches I won’t be holding back. I will opening up to beat down some foreign competitors. It is funny how when you are in a situation in which you have nothing to lose that it is easier to be bolder, but when you think that you are risking something that it is easier to shut down. Human psychology is crazy and completely irrational.
Anyway this week is a lighter week of training, and then next week I pick up the intensity again. I feel really confident in myself right now, and I am looking forward to this summer. I will have plenty of great training opportunities and competition opportunities. I have two awesome training partners coming into town on Saturday, and then I have a tournament in Azerbaijan at the beginning of July. I am sure that some of you reading this had no idea that there was even a country called Azerbaijan, but I will be leaving there for a week to compete against some of the worlds best at the Golden Grand Prix. I also have a really tough competition in Poland the beginning of August which I am looking forward to. I am just looking forward to the fight that goes along in wrestling.
I am learning more and more to learn to love to battle. Dennis Hall, World Champion, and wrestling hall of famer has really helped me appreciate the battle of the sport. I have also had the chance to wrestle Rulon Gardner lately, and every time he wrestles it is a battle. In fact the last time that we wrestled he punched me in the face and gave me a black eye. The funny thing is that he didn’t do it on purpose. In fact, I would be surprised if he even knew that he punched me in the face. He was just being intense and aggressive. The benefit of being punched is that it also gives you the right to hit them back. It is like when you are playing basketball or soccer and the other team starts to cheat. Then it is like “Okay I guess we are playing by those rules then…Okay fine by me, but don’t start crying when we are kicking your butt by 10 points and you don’t know how we got ahead so fast.”
I usually don’t toot my horn too much, which my wife gets mad at me about sometimes. Logically I understand that I need to open my mouth and market myself more if I want more people to support and follow me, but emotionally it is a struggle to not go on about myself when I am talking with people. I see people shamefully promote themselves all of the time, and it doesn’t bother me so I guess my thought process should be that if I were doing the same thing that it wouldn’t bother others either. So not to go off on a tangent here are two links:
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/sports/51997179-77/ruiz-olympic-wrestling-former.html.csp
and
http://themat.com/article.php?ArticleID=23738
The first link is an article that was written by a local writer here in Utah, which by the way I have moved to Utah if you don’t know where I am. The second link is an article that I won the 2010 Greco Roman wrestler of the year award. I hope you enjoy them.
Posted in Personal | Tags: 2011 Greco Roman World Team Trials, greco roman wrestling, Justin Ruiz | 4 Comments »