Personal
Winners and Losers
November 19, 2011 | 
Author “Losers have tons of variety. Champions just take pride in learning to hit the same old boring winning shots.” – Vic Braden
How much time are you spending on the fundamentals? It doesn’t matter what field or industry that you are in, there are certain fundamentals of what you are working at that need attention. It is human nature to often times look for the new or flashy fad that they think will bring them success. However, the truth is that the better you are at fundamentals, the more success that you will achieve in whatever you are working at.
I have taught kids all over the country, and it is always easy to pick out which kids are really going to succeed. The kids that will have the most success are the ones that stick to the basics and repeat them over and over again, trying to find the perfect way to execute the same old boring move day in and day out. They are able to focus on a couple of things and get really good at them. On the other hand, I also see kids who jump from one move to the next without really mastering any of them. I don’t blame them because I have definitely been in that situation before. It is much more fun to practice the new, slick, fancy move that looks really cool when executed as opposed to working on the same thing that you worked on the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that. However, it is also a lot more fun to win than it is to lose, and the more that I focus on doing the basics correctly and better than my competition, the more I win.
I really think that the key is just sitting down and deciding, “Ok. What do I really want to be good at?” Then, after you have made up your mind, you need to go do that thing over and over and over again. Then, the next day, you need to get back up and go do that same thing over and over and over again. Will it be hard? Of course it will be, but that is the same reason why you will value the skill so much after you have mastered it because you will know that you worked so hard for it.
Stay focused and become great at something. The world needs and is waiting for you.
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Tags: greco roman wrestling, Justin Ruiz, london 2012, olympic games, olympic wrestling, winners and losers | 
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Smiling In The Face Of Adversity
“If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small.” Proverbs 24:10
I read that scripture this morning, and it gave me a little push. I definitely needed it. While climbing the mountain of success, because it is a climb, there are always going to be different valleys in between the peaks that you ascend. For a lot of people these valleys might be failed businesses, failed relationships, illness, or myriad of other things. In the life of an athlete some of the great valleys to be conquered are losing matches and injury. When you lose a match it definitely is not pleasant, however, you do have the opportunity to get back out on the mat and start working to correct the mistakes that you made while you were wrestling or you might work harder developing your skills in crucial positions. When an injury occurs, depending on the severity of it, you can’t always jump right back on the mat. That is the situation I am in today, and I am not really happy about it.
I hurt my shoulder about a week ago, and at first I thought that I had just strained some muscles and that after giving it a little bit of rest, ice, and massage that I would be back on the mat training for an Olympic title. Unfortunately I haven’t really recovered the way that I had planned. I was supposed to be leaving on a plane tomorrow to travel to New York City for an international wrestling tournament, but that isn’t going to happen. I saw the doctor on Monday, got an MRI on my shoulder yesterday, and today I am waiting for that phone call to find out what exactly the problem is in my shoulder and how I can go about getting it better. It seems like such an interesting trait of people to not truly appreciate what it is that they have until that thing is taken away from you. I think that health is definitely one thing that I take for granted. I might be going through some tough workout and thinking how painful and uncomfortable things are in the moment, but now I am wishing that I could put myself through those mini torture sessions. Now the torture that I am putting myself through is waiting for the phone to ring so that I can talk with the doctor. I hope that she says, “Well you strained some muscles so take it easy for a couple days, and you’ll be good as new.” That might not be a very realistic expectation.
One thing I can expect to do is to work to have the right mindset. Injuries suck, but that is part of sports and also part of life. There have been plenty of times when I have stepped out on an icy road and slipped. I usually am able to catch my balance, but then I think, “What would have happened to me if I was 85 years old? I would probably fall and break a hip and freeze out in a parking lot somewhere.” That would be horrible, but I am sure that it has probably happened to someone. So now I am trying to focus on what is in my control to get healthy again in as little time as possible. I am supposed to fly to Belarus on Monday for a training camp and tournament so I am really going to have to get things together quickly. I need to focus on my rehab. I need to focus on my rest. I need to focus on doing everything I can to be able to keep climbing that mountain. I’ve seen valleys before, and I am sure that I will see them again. However, right now, I just want to get to another peak.
The Day It All Made Sense
I am sure that at some point in everyone’s life, they have an “aha!” moment. I don’t think that this moment is always going to change someone’s life because quite frankly, not everyone will take action on the great idea that they come up with. If fact, I am really no different. I have had great ideas in the past, but I never put them into practice, and as a result nothing really ever came of them. However, just the other day, I felt like I had a huge breakthrough.
I have been wrestling for most of my life. I haven’t had a whole lot of day jobs or work experience like most normal people in our society do. I have learned to work my butt off, and I have learned what it takes to be great at something. The answer obviously is time and effort. However, for years I remember people talking about how wrestling prepares you for life, and how after you have wrestled everything else in life is easy. Most of the people that would say these things were wrestling coaches and they were trying to get their kids to buy into their program or the sport or whatever. I have always been pretty busy looking at how wrestling applies to wrestling, and I haven’t taken a whole lot of time to look at other things in life and think to myself “I think that this wrestling lesson applies to what it is that I am doing.” The other day though I was thinking about the importance of making scoring attempts in wrestling. The more attempts that you make, the more points that you will score, but I had never thought about how that applies to life.
When you make scoring attempts in wrestling you obviously take your lumps if it is a brand new move that you are trying to execute, but as you at least make the attempt you learn how to scramble and recover if for some reason you end up in a bad position. Eventually you learn how to execute and when to execute and things to watch out for. Over time you do the move over and over again, and you become the expert. Then you feel using that technique against the very best people in the world. It isn’t a really complicated process, but it does take time and effort. Then I realized that you can take that same model or idea and apply it to anything in life or business or whatever. You get good by trying to do whatever it is that you want to do. People don’t just start out good at sports, school, business, music, etc… They get good by practicing and everyday trying to do just a little bit more or do a little bit better. If you do this day in and day out, think about how good you will be at it at the end of 5, 10, or even 20 years. So I guess the whole moral of the story is to figure out what you want to be good at and start doing it. Even if you are horrible at it right now, even if people tell you that you are crazy, even though you have no experience or background in that thing, start today. As you make the attempts you will get good at whatever it is that you want to do, and you will be happy that you made the effort because at the end of the day you will have made something of yourself.
The Times That I Wanted To Quit Wrestling And Why I’m Glad That I Didn’t
Wrestling is a very tough sport. There is a lot of physical training that goes into being prepared to wrestle a match. This means that there is a lot of pain that you have to endure. You endure the pain of tough wrestling practices, you endure the pain of being sore from training, you endure pain from the slight injuries that you acquire throughout a season or career, you endure pain from the dieting to get down to weight, you endure pain from the emotional stress that comes before wrestling a match, and you endure pain from missing out on fun that other people are having while you are busy putting yourself through some more pain. To put it bluntly, wrestling is all about pain. In fact, then when you are wrestling you want to turn around and inflict pain on whoever is your opponent. Pain, pain, pain.
I’m not writing this to complain about the pain that is an unavoidable part of wrestling, but rather reflect on some of the times where the pain almost beat me, about the times when I almost gave up. I don’t think that anyone ever gets to the top without ever having the thought of quitting cross their mind. There have been plenty of times when I wanted to give up and move on to other, seemingly less painful things, but the truth is that there is always going to be pain in whatever it is that we are striving for; and if you want to be good at something you can’t avoid it. That is just the way it is.
The first year that I started wrestling I was pretty naive. I had no idea about technique, conditioning, match strategy, and the list goes on. I knew that the sport was hard, but I received the utmost satisfaction from going to practice and competing. I had never experienced anything like it, and I was so eager to learn everything that there was to learn about wrestling. Maybe it was because I was young or maybe it was because I was too foolish to think about quitting that I never really did. I can’t remember during that first year of wrestling when I thought about quitting. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t think about quitting, all it means is that I don’t remember thinking about it. However, during my second year of wrestling, I most definitely remembering a time when I wanted to quit.
I was wrestling as a freshman at Taylorsville high school, and I was being introduced to the pain that came with wrestling at the high school level. I learned how painful sets of bear crawls were at the end of practice after you had already given it everything you had during sparring. I learned how painful sprints were, and I learned how painful it was to get beat up by older wrestlers. Wrestling got a lot tougher. There was one practice in particular that I remember, and there were a lot of the older wrestlers who were sand bagging that day. You see there was a new head coach that year, and some of the older wrestlers had some trouble accepting their new coach and his wrestling philosophy. I didn’t know any differently, and I thought that he was doing a good job, but not everyone felt the same way as I did. We were working on a drill, and my coach made known his frustration about the lack of effort that was going into the practice. He basically told everyone that if they didn’t want to be there that they could just leave. There were a few seniors who got up and walked right out the door. They decided that they were ready to leave the sport that they had loved for so many years. I remember wavering back and forth as some of the seniors walked out. I remember thinking how much easier my life could be again if I just walked out the door. I wouldn’t have to go to practice in the afternoon, I wouldn’t have to cut weight, I wouldn’t be tired, and I could go home and watch TV and play video games like I used to. It was such a tempting thought that I almost stood up myself and walked right out the door, but I didn’t. Who would have known that from that time I would still be wrestling well over a decade later?
Another time that I remember wanting to quit was when I had returned home from my mission. The two years that I spent on my mission was a great time, but it was a time that I didn’t do much wrestling at all. I was fat and out of shape when I arrived back at the University of Nebraska and started preseason workouts. I felt slow, and I really questioned whether or not I would be able to perform at that level after I had taken so much time off from serious training. The workouts were intense, and my body hurt like crazy. There was also the added stress of trying to become normal again after having spent two years living more like a monk than an elite athlete. It was hard. There was one day when we went for a long run, and I was so tired during the run that I prayed the entire time that I was running because I didn’t think that I would make it otherwise. There were thoughts that entered my mind like, “What if I made a mistake by trying to wrestle again? I’m going to humiliate myself. Maybe I should just quit now and move back home.” Luckily for me though, I kept going to practice, and as I got back into shape I was able to win wrestling matches again. By the end of the season I did well enough to earn All American honors at the NCAA national tournament as well as make it to the national finals at the U.S. Open. I had come a long way from that long run at the beginning of the season, and I was glad that I kept enduring the pain.
In 2004 I lost in the finals of the Olympic Trials. I had beaten my opponent in the finals of the U.S. Open just a couple of months earlier, and I was devastated to have gotten so close to accomplishing my life’s major goal and to have failed. One thing that is interesting about life is that it is very hard to describe the level of pain that an individual is experiencing. I know that at the chiropractor’s office that I go to that I fill out a chart every visit, and I have to circle a number from 1-10 that describes the pain level that I am experiencing. However, I don’t think that accurately describes what you are feeling, and if you try to explain to someone what it feels like to lose something that you have worked so hard for that they won’t entirely understand unless they experience it themselves. That is one reason I feel sorry for people who commit suicide. I have experienced some serious pain in my life, but it has never pushed me to the point when I want to end my life. I can’t imagine what those people are going through. Anyway to say the least, losing the Olympic Trials was a very painful experience, and I wanted to quit wrestling. I even told my coach at the time that I was going to be done wrestling Greco and that I was going to be moving on with my life. I wanted to finish school and then become a lawyer. I thought that it was a great plan, however, I didn’t follow through with it. Instead I took some time off from wrestling and went home to Utah. I was ready to just stay there despite my then girlfriend now wife was back in Colorado, and she didn’t even know if I was going to go back to Colorado. All I told her was that I needed some time off, and that I was going to Utah. It was a good thing that I was dating her at the time or I might never have gone back. Either way I kept wrestling, and I am glad that I did. That next year, I won a bronze medal at the world championships. I went from being on the verge of quitting to being one of the very best wrestlers on the planet. I was very happy that I kept working towards my goals and had set in for another wrestling cycle.
Fast forward another few years, and I am wrestling again in the finals of the Olympic Trials. I have beaten my opponent numerous times, and I am heavily favored to win. Unfortunately I lost. I thought that I had experienced some serious pain when I had lost in 2004, but this time was a million times worse. I broke down right there on the mat and cried inconsolably. I couldn’t believe that I had lost and that I wouldn’t be on the Olympic team that year. I was absolutely devastated. I tried to compose myself and put on a good face for all of the people that had come out to watch me. I apologized to them for losing even though I owed them no apology. I had done my best, but it wasn’t good enough that day. I went to bed late that night, but I didn’t sleep through the night. Around 3 am my wife woke up because she could feel the bed shaking. I was curled up in the fetal position in our bed in our hotel room quietly sobbing, but I couldn’t stop my body’s convulsions from waking her up. She held me like I was a little child, and I tried to let all of the pain drain out of me through my tears. It didn’t work. It just hurt too badly.
I thought that time would help heal the pain that I was going through but it didn’t. When I got back to Colorado, I started going back to practice, and I wrestled with the opponent who had beaten me in the Olympic Trials. I was beating him again, just like I had always beaten him in practice, just like I had consistently beaten him in matches, but it didn’t matter because it wasn’t for the Olympics anymore. He was going and I wasn’t. I told the coaches that it was too painful for me to keep going in to practice so I stopped, but it didn’t make the pain go away. Then a few weeks later my wife’s grandfather died, then a few weeks later we lost an unborn child. I definitely wanted to quit then. I wanted to quit everything. Life had gotten the best of me so I did quit for a little while. I moved to Wyoming, and started working out in the oil fields. I started having thoughts of what it was going to be like working out there for the next 30 years. I figured that I would be one of those guys that ends up telling stories of how great they are at something but nobody believes them because the obvious first thought is, “Well if you are so good at it, then why aren’t you doing it now?”
Somehow though I hadn’t entirely quit wrestling. After the better part of a year had passed, I was anxious to get back on the mat. I didn’t even have to compete, I just wanted to be close to a wrestling mat on a regular basis. Somehow after what I would describe as life taking a crap on me, life reached out a hand to help lift me out of the pile of refuse that it had left me under for too long. An old friend, Russell Brunson, called me up to come work for him and wrestle for him. I jumped on the opportunity and was wrestling again. That next year I made another world team and was 5th in the world. Once again, I had gone from the brink of wrestling despair to being one of the best wrestlers in the world. It was a very satisfying accomplishment for me. I am also glad that I didn’t entirely give up because if I did, I wouldn’t have all of the great opportunities and people in my life that I do now. Now I am wrestling, and I am loving it. I have the opportunity to coach people in this great sport as well as write on my blog every now and then. Hopefully it will inspire someone else to keep moving ahead and not give up because I know that everyone wants to give up at some point. I hope that maybe someone else can see that even though things might really suck in their life right now that things can get better. Don’t give up too early because you don’t know what success may be waiting for you right around the corner.
How Coaching Can Help You Become A Better Wrestler
This summer I started coaching a wrestling class a couple of times a week at a local gym where I live. The gym is called University of Grappling and it is run by Ricky Lundell, a jiu jitsu ninja, but that is a whole other story in itself. I started coaching the class as a trade with Ricky so that my wife and I could use the facilities, and his wife would train my wife in their workouts. I am so lucky that it has given me a chance to coach on a more regular basis. I find that when I am coaching someone else that I am reminded about what I should be focusing on to get better as well as correct some of the finer points of technique. I really feel like the time I spend coaching will help me to improve going into this Olympic year.
I am also a volunteer assistant coach at Utah Valley University, and I go in every now and then to work with some of the college kids on technique and wrestle around with them. I also feel like some of the scrambles and the nature of college wrestling helps with my conditioning. Greco roman wrestling and folkstyle wrestling are two very different types of wrestling, but I feel by having to think through some of the different styles, my minds opens up a little more to help me out with my greco some more, which is the type I am most focused on now anyway. Every now and then I even roll around in Ricky’s jiu jitsu class, and it is amazing how different it is. The novelty of other styles also helps to keep my training fresh because it isn’t a matter of going to the gym every day and doing the exact same thing. I know that repetition is very important in wrestling, but it is always nice to change it up every now and then.
Regardless of what it is that you are doing, if you start to teach people how to do what it is that you are doing, you will start to see areas that you can do better in yourself. If you are a salesman, and you start teaching other people sales, you will see ways that you can become a better salesman. If you are a teacher, and you start to teach others to teach, you will become a better teacher. If you start teaching people wrestling, you will find ways that you can become a better wrestler. Get out and start teaching. The pay off is amazing.
Posted in Personal | Tags: greco roman wrestling, jiu jitsu, Justin Ruiz, ricky lundell, teaching, wrestling | No Comments »
If I Knew Then What I Know Now
I think most everyone has at one point in their life, while reflecting on choices they have made, end up thinking, “If I knew then what I know now things would be different.” While it is tempting to look back and think about how you could have used that knowledge that you had to work and struggle for in a situation in your past, it is better to look at that knowledge that you have gained and apply in to your real time circumstances. Because the reality of it is that people are creatures of habits, and we tend to go through cycles where we end up doing the same things. Whether for right or for wrong, we tend to repeat what it is that we do over and over again. So the key to success lies in applying what we know or what we have learned to what it is we are working on today.
This is really easy to apply to something like wrestling because while competing you end up in a lot of the same positions over and over again. One of the techniques that I really like in Greco roman wrestling is the straight lift. It involves locking your opponent by the waist, lifting them off of the mat, and throwing them through the air. Depending on the amplitude of the throw, you will be awarded 1, 3, or 5 points for the throw that you execute. The initial lift is, in my opinion, the easiest part of the technique. The hard part is finishing the throw and scoring points. During the execution of this move, there is a split second where you have to re-cinch your lock in order to catch your opponents hip that will enable you to turn him during the throw. If you miss the hip, or if you don’t readjust, the move can end badly with your opponent landing on top of you.
When I was first learning the move as a youth, there were times when I tried to lift and throw but was unsuccessful because I didn’t know the importance of re-cinching my lock. As a result, I had some bad throws, and I either didn’t receive any points for my attempt or I ended up losing points. However, after someone showed me how to re-cinch my lock, I was able to do a much better job of getting the results that I wanted. This circumstance is an example of when I am sure that I thought to myself, “If I only knew then what I know now.” However, fast forward several years to the Olympic trials. I am in a position where I need to score to win the match, and there is a lot that is riding on executing this one move successfully. I start my lift, pull the hip, and try to finish. I don’t have the hip caught, and we end up falling back to the mat with no points scored. I lose the match, end up crying out there like a big baby, and I missed out on the Olympics that go around. I didn’t have the crutch of saying, “I didn’t know.” because I did. I just didn’t execute. The same position that I was in years before had come back into my life, and unfortunately I didn’t apply what I had already learned.
Well we all end up in the same positions from previously in our lives. The challenge is in doing what we know we should do. There are generally two types of regret that I am familiar with. One is the regret of action and the other is the regret of inaction. However, neither type of regret can change the past, and it is pointless to dwell on what could have been. You can’t change the past no matter how hard you try, but lucky for us we can shape today and hope for a better future. So there’s our challenge, the challenge to use what we have learned to live our lives today in a way that we won’t regret them in the future. It is a daunting task, but when given the choice between living a life full of purpose and joy or a life full of misery and regret, which one would you choose?
Posted in Personal | Tags: greco roman wrestling, if only i knew then what I know know, Justin Ruiz, olympic wrestling, straight lift | No Comments »
The Two Best Years I Ever Had
Okay so let me rephrase that they were two great years, but at the time I thought that they were the two best years of my life. However, as I have gotten older and gained a little more experience, I have come to realize that any day that you are above the ground is a great one, and it should be cherished. However, the two years that I am referring to are the 2 years that I spent in Chile while I served in the Concepcion, Chile mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It was a time where I learned so many great life lessons, met hundreds of amazing people, and realized how blessed I was and still am for having had the experience.
I was 19 years old when I went on my mission, and to be honest with you I was really surprised that I actually went. When I was a kid, I rarely saw the missionaries even though I grew up in Utah, but everyone had so many good things to say about their missions as well as the missionaries that I wanted to go on a mission someday too. However, as I got to high school and involved with wrestling, my plans changed. I wanted to earn a scholarship to wrestle in college, and I didn’t think that there was any way that I would be able to go on a mission and wrestle in college successfully. Taking two years off from my training to go teach people about Jesus was not what I thought would be an effective training plan.
I did earn a college scholarship, and I went to the University of Nebraska. While I was there though, things were different than they were at home. I was an adult and able to do whatever it was that I wanted to. I’ll be honest, I made some poor decisions. However, I also made some good decisions. One of those decisions was to go out with the missionaries to help them in some of their teaching appointments. I remember that I liked being with the missionaries, and I remember how good I felt while I was with them. It was during that time that I realized that I wanted to go on a mission myself and have the same experience as they were having.
It wasn’t easy for me to tell my coach that I would be leaving for two years. When he was recruiting me, he had asked me whether or not I was planning on going on a mission, and I told him no. It was the truth. I wasn’t planning on it, but like a lot of things in life my plans changed. Before I met with him, I was nervous about what he was going to say. I was worried that he was going to be really upset about it, and I was also worried about my scholarship. I wasn’t sure that I would still have one when I returned after two years. However, the conversation went really well, and he wasn’t mad at all. He was surprised, but he was supportive of me doing what I felt I needed and wanted to do. He even said that he would hold my scholarship for me for when I returned. I was relieved.
When I entered the missionary training center or MTC, I really thought that I was smart. I had been to college for a year, and I really thought that I knew a lot of things. I thought I knew how to work hard. I thought that I knew how to study, and I thought that I was in good shape. When I got to the MTC, I realized what focus was. We spent hours every day in the class room learning our lessons and learning the language where we would be going. I was headed to Chile so I was learning Spanish. On top of the class time, I studied a lot in my spare time. I made it a competition. I tried so hard to memorize the lessons before I got to Chile, and I really wanted to learn the language. I don’t know if people who were in my district knew it, but I was trying to be the first one to memorize all of the lessons before everyone else. I wanted to beat them. Later I learned it wasn’t about beating them. It was about working with them. Unfortunately it took me a while to figure that one out.
When I arrived in Chile, and we were waiting in the airport in Santiago to catch a plane down to Concepcion, I heard the people speaking Spanish. The only problem was that it didn’t sound anything like the Spanish that I had learned before I left the United States. This Spanish was different, and they were speaking so fast that I could only pick out one or two words if I was lucky. I remember seeing a small child that we were sitting next to, and he was talking to his mother. He couldn’t have been older than three years old. I remember thinking, “Wow, a small child can speak better than I can. This is going to be a long two years.” However, after I got to my first area, I started to pick up the language fairly well, and after about 6 months, I had a strong enough command of the language to teach as well as carry on some conversation.
There were so many great people that I met while I was in Chile. I made a lot of friends, and I was so pleasantly surprised by how welcoming and caring all of the people were there. We lived with families in “pensiones”. We ate with them, talked with them, and went to church with them. I really think that some of those families considered us to be a part of the family. It was like they loved us like we were their children. It was a great time. I met people that after a few short meetings it had felt like we had known each other for years, and the emotional ups and downs were unbelievable. When the people that we taught were happy we were happy. When the people we taught were struggling we struggled as well and prayed for them. We prayed a lot.
One thing that I learned from my mission was that the United States is a great place. There is so much opportunity in our country that it is unbelievable how good we have it. Even with a struggling economy, most people still have a car, a home, a refrigerator, warm showers, and central air. These comforts were very rare in some cases. I spent two winters showering in cold water because the families’ water heaters were broken. I taught families who’s floor was dirt, but they would sweep it to keep it clean. I taught families in homes that would have been better replaced by a Tuff Shed. I taught families who had absolutely nothing as far as material things, but I swear some of them were the happiest most pleasant people that I have ever met. I remember teaching one family who was really struggling financially. We had a lesson with them one evening, and they had set out some bread and a toasted wheat drink for us after the lesson was over. They only had very little, and I know that they were hungry. They had no money for extra food, but they wanted us to be taken care of. My teaching companion and I tried to refuse because we knew they needed it much more than we did. I was fine. In fact, I was fat. They wouldn’t listen though. They threatened not to let us come back if we didn’t eat it, so we ate as little as possible just so that they would not be offended. That was a hard night for me. When I think of it now and realize that there are other people in the world who are struggling just like that or worse, I get choked up, and then I feel grateful to be blessed with so much. Sure our country has it’s problems, but overall we are very fortunate.
Those two years were great years. I could go on and on about all that happened while I was there. I am sure that as my kids grow up, they will get the chance to hear about all of those stories. When I travel overseas to wrestling tournaments especially in eastern Europe, I am reminded about the time that I spent in Chile. The funny thing is that I will mention something that compares that country that we are in to Chile, and one of my team mates, Dremiel Byers, always gives me a hard time about it. Without fail, he always says, “Why you gotta be talkin’ about Chile again?” I have no choice. I was there for two years. It is part of my life. It was great.
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It Gets Easier As You Do It, So Make Sure You’re Doing The Right Things
One thing that I have learned throughout the years that the first time that you do something new, it is difficult. I remember the first time that I had to make weight at 171 pounds my freshman year. That was definitely something that was hard the first time that I did it, but as the season went on, it became much easier. By the end of the season, I had my workouts and diet down to a science, and I could tell how much I weighed by how sweaty my clothes were after practice. I know that may sound gross, but it is the truth. It was something that I had worked hard for. Every day after a grueling practice, I would grab my jump rope and start bouncing away to the rhythm of whatever music was playing in the wrestling room. It was usually music from the eighties that my coach loved or it was music from the Rocky IV soundtrack. Even to this day when I hear one of those songs it takes me back to that room. It was in that room that I shed 40 pounds off my frame to get down to a weight where I felt I could compete and win at, but it wasn’t easy. I had to learn how to do the right things and do them over and over until I got the results that I was working so hard for.
When I first started my weight loss journey, I had no idea about what a calorie was. I knew that some foods were definitely better for me than others were, but I was really clueless about what my body needed and how it would respond to a restriction of calories. When I first started “dieting” I tried to get by eating lettuce with some fat free Italian dressing on it, and a couple of pieces of bread for dinner. I would eat a little breakfast, and I would eat a little lunch. Really what I was doing was starving myself, and it took a while of feeling tired, weak, and sluggish before I realized there were certain things that I could eat to lose weight and still feel good while I trained. I stopped drinking my calories, I cut out most dairy, I stopped eating fatty cuts of meat, and I eliminated junk food from my diet. I did start to eat more fruits and vegetables, more beans, and a lot of chicken. The healthy eating coupled with a lot of exercise got me the results that I was looking for. I was able to drop that weight, and instead of being a fat kid, I was a fit kid. I gained a new confidence and strength, and I was winning wrestling matches. I did the right things, and I got the right results that I was looking for.
I know that the idea sounds simple. Sure you do the right things and good things happen. Of course it is hard at the beginning, but then it gets easier and easier as you go. When you develop good habits you feel good to keep doing the right things. Then if you start to slip up and get lazy in working toward your goals, you can also build inertia in the other direction. So if you are on a strict diet and you hit a fast food joint, you might feel bad about it at first, but if you stop by that same fast food joint two days in a row it is easier the second time. Finally, if you stop at the same place a third day in a row, then you are in big trouble, and you have possibly ruined your diet for the week because now you have 3 bad days in a row. You might be thinking, “Well I will just start next week.” That is not a good idea. The best time to start something is now. Even if you think that conditions may be more favorable in the future, chances are that you can still take some sort of action today that will put you in a better place for when your moment of truth arrives. Don’t get caught in a downward spiral by doing the wrong things because they get easier to do as well the more you do them.
I don’t recall who said it, but the saying goes, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” If you start working on something today, you really might surprise yourself as to what you can make happen. I have noticed in my life, as soon as I start working toward something, doors begin to open that I had no idea even existed. I am sure that the same can happen for you. Get started on whatever you have been putting off. Get started on it today! This doesn’t just apply to weight loss or wrestling. Sure you need to do the right things in wrestling. You have to do the technique the right way in practice if you want to hit it the right way in a match. Sure you should practice your sales presentation so that you can get it right in the big meeting coming up. Of course you need to rehearse the song that you are going to perform on stage. Just make sure that you know what course you are on, and if it is in the wrong direction change it. Nobody says that you can’t.
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Posted in Personal | Tags: greco roman wrestling, Justin Ruiz, losing weight, olympic wrestling, take action today | No Comments »
Two Times I Almost Died On The Job And Why I Won’t Do It Again
I was broke. It was the summer of 2008 and I had a lot of bad things happening to me. I really felt like I couldn’t get a break. I had a job end up falling through, I had lost the Olympic trials to an opponent I beat on a regular basis, my wife’s grandfather had died, and we lost a child to miscarriage. It was the summer from hell, and I was ready to move on with my life. However, it would take some money to do that, and at the time, I didn’t have any so I started looking for work. I looked in the newspaper to find something that I could do. I didn’t have a whole lot of work experience since I had pretty much spent my whole life wrestling. Sure I had been to college and worked a few odd jobs, but I didn’t have a whole lot of work experience. I had also served a two year mission which had provided me with some presentation, self organization, and people skills. I also learned Spanish during my two year stint in Chile. Looking back, I guess I did have some skills, but I wasn’t really confident in going and asking for a job in any particular industry so I started to look around hoping that something would work out. I went to some resume writing classes, and I did a lot of job searching. For some reason I was really considering selling cars, but when I talked to Sarah about it I realized that selling cars was probably not going to be something that I would be really excited about. I kept looking.
I got lucky, and my brother in law hooked me up with a lawn mowing gig for the rest of the summer. The job was 3 hours south of where we were living so we ended up packing up the car and going to Alamosa to stay with my in laws for the rest of the summer while I mowed lawns. It wasn’t my dream job, but the owner paid well especially for the work that we were doing so I couldn’t pass it up. I started waking up early in the morning so that I could meet the crew, and we would head out and get to work. It wasn’t hard. I would ride a lawnmower for 7 to 8 hours and be home by 3 or 3:30. The toughest part about it was one day when the boss came up to me and asked, “So one day you’re wrestling to be in the Olympics, and the next day you’re mowing lawns. What’s that like?” If I could have I would have driven right over him with the lawn mower. I don’t think he truly understood how badly the pain of losing still burned inside of me. If he would have, I doubt he would have asked such a stupid question. I told him, “Not good.” and drove away.
On top of the lawn mowing, I started to call around to try to set up some wrestling clinics to get some more money together. I called an acquaintance of mine who had been a roommate of another brother in law. He had helped coached at one of the local high schools, and I figured that I could set up a clinic with him or at least get a chance to talk to the head coach about it. When I talked to him he was going on and on about how he was working in Wyoming and how he was making a bunch of money working with hydrovac trucks. I jokingly asked if they were looking for people. He said that they were, and within about an hour he had lined up a job for me. My wife and I talked about it, and we came up with a plan. We would move to Wyoming to work for a year and save up some money. Then we would move back to Colorado Springs where I had been training, and I could start up my training again. The plan sounded like a good one at the time, but little did we know what we had in store.
I left for Wyoming a couple of days later, and as soon as I started working, I knew that it was going to be a very long year. We were waking up every morning at 3 a.m. to go to work and we would get home around 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. There was absolutely no time to do anything in between shifts except to eat and go to bed. I hated my alarm clock, and I hated waking up that early. Every morning, I would question how I could have made the decisions that led me to where I was at the time. Sure the pay was great, but it was not what I wanted to be doing, especially for the long term. I endured the weeks of hard work and sleep deprivation. My wife grew accustomed to giving me pep talks on a regular basis telling me how it was just one year and how we would be in a much better situation when it was over. I would appreciate her in the moment for cheering me up, and then the next morning I would hate myself for having listened to her pep talk because I didn’t feel so peppy at 3 a.m. I accepted the grind and kept on working.
One of the main work sites where we did a lot of labor was out on the Jonah field. There were rigs all over the place, and there were also plenty of gas lines that were coming up on pretty much every corner where you would turn. It was amazing how much gas was being pumped out of that place every day all day. We were all working long hours and sleeping very little. Safety is no joke out there, and if you screw up you could end up dead. Fortunately for me, one day when I screwed up Someone was watching out for me.
It was winter and we had a job to do out on the Jonah. I was driving the pickup with two coworkers out to the job site. We were running late so I was trying to make up the time by driving a lot faster than I should have, especially considering the icy and snowy conditions. We had made it to the Jonah, and I was driving like the Dukes of Hazard on the dirt roads that led to the site. I still feel horrible when I think about what could have happened to us. I took a curve too fast, and the pickup turned and slid right off of the road into all the chico bushes that were all over the place. The truck came to a stop, and then I slowly drove back to the dirt road, having been very humbled. You see any other turn that I would have taken at that speed, and I wouldn’t be here today to write about it. We would have slid right into exposed gas lines and have all been blown up or burned up in the cab of our pickup. Both of my coworkers knew it, and I knew it. We all knew that we had narrowly escaped with our lives. I apologized profusely to both of them, and I was sorry. I had been extremely reckless. The drive was pretty quiet the rest of the way to the job site. I think that they probably both would have liked to kill me themselves. I tried to learn from the experience, and I slowed down.
Another time where I got lucky was when we were doing a pit clean up. With the drilling process for natural gas there is a lot of nasty by product that comes out of the earth. All of this nastiness and sludge has to be contained in a way that it won’t damage the environment if at all possible. That’s what these pits were for. The pits were deep pits that had liners on them to keep all of the by product from seeping back into the earth. I know you might be wondering if something came from the earth why not just let it go back into the earth? You shouldn’t because this stuff came from way down below, and it has also had other nasty things like diesel fuel mixed with it. They use diesel to help lubricate the bits when they are drilling. That should give you an idea of how nasty and gross it was. Black sludge, and sand mixed with diesel and a combination of harmful gases mixed in. It is like a giant cancer causing cocktail. That is if the H2S doesn’t get you first.
Hydrogen sulfide or H2S is a deadly gas that comes with the other gases that come up out of the ground when drilling for natural gas. H2S will kill you before you even smell it, especially because it is odorless. When there was a possibility of this gas being present, we had to wear oxygen masks and wear a meter to find out if the gas was there and if we could work safely with the equipment that we had. I had heard horror stories of people dying from H2S in our safety training and from coworkers. My boss had told me about his father’s friend who had fought in Vietnam and survived only to later be working on a rig and dying from exposure to the gas. He also told me about a group of workers on a rig where one guy went down because of the gas and another man saw it so he tried to go save him. He was killed as well as about five people total because they kept rushing over to help their friends. If you saw someone go down. You were supposed to leave them until you were fitted with the proper equipment to get them. That is one of the reasons we would work while being tied off to a lifeline so if you did go down, other people on your team could drag you out.
While working on cleaning out a very large pit, we were all equipped with gas masks, and the air hoses ran down about 100 feet into the pit where we were working. There were also hoses for our pressure washers, life lines to pull us out, and large vacuum hoses that were sucking all of the debris out of the pit while we were cleaning the lining to remove and replace it. It had tears in it, and as a result the sludge was seeping back into the ground. So you can imagine it was easy to get tangled up in all of these lines, and it was a very slow process to be able to exit the pit. We all had emergency air tanks in case our oxygen line got pinched or plugged or disconnected. Well one day my line got disconnected.
I was working down in the pit. We had on tyvek suits, big rubber gloves, rubber boots, and our gas masks. We also had the openings to our gloves and boots sealed off with duck tape. We didn’t want to get any of that nastiness on our skin. We didn’t know what it would do. The sludge was also very slippery, and combining that with the rubber gloves made it difficult to do any type of work with your hands that would require any type of detail oriented task. I was working away sweating like I was cutting weight in the hot tyvek suit with our fire resistant coverall underneath. It was about mid day when it was the hottest. I still remember the feeling of it all hot and sweaty my body not being able to breathe and cool itself, but that feeling paled in comparison to what I would soon be feeling. I was out in the middle of the pit cleaning up and moving a hose when all of the sudden I lost any flow of air that I had. With each breath that I tried to take the mask suctioned to my face tighter and tighter as if it was trying to suffocate me. I tried harder and harder to breathe, but each time that I did, the mask stuck to my face like an octopus trying to smother me. I tried not to panic and reached down to turn on the air flow from my emergency tank. The rubber glove just slipped around the knob that would open the tank and give me some life sustaining oxygen. I kept trying to twist but nothing happened. I tried to tear off my gloves to get a better grip on the tank, but my gloves were heavily duck taped to my suit; and it was impossible to get a good enough grip to tear it. I panicked. I alternated from tearing at my gloves to opening my tank, but nothing worked. I finally tore my mask off for a split second and took a greedy gulp of the air in that pit. Whatever I breathed in was not good for me, but luckily there was no H2S that day. I put my mask back down after a split second and continued to wrench on my air tank. Finally the knob budged, and I was blessed once again with the flow of oxygen to my now burning lungs. I was lucky. I got out of the pit, had my airline repaired, and finished the work day.
As I drove home, I couldn’t help but think once again about what could have happened if I was in a different pit and H2S would have been there. I could have been dead lying at the bottom of a sludge filled pit out in nowhere Wyoming leaving a then pregnant wife and unborn daughter to live their lives without me. I didn’t like that idea at all. It wasn’t worth it. I was leaving. I finished the job, and fortunately had a new job offer that would allow me to work and begin wrestling again out in Boise, Idaho. I jumped on the opportunity, and I never missed having to wake up at 3 a.m. to go to work.
Even though the time that I spent in Wyoming was tough, I made some good friends while I was out there. I also had the experience to do something that I never want to do again. After I left, I made myself the promise that I would do whatever was necessary to never have to go back to work there. The people that have their career in that industry are tough. They’re tougher than me. I hated the job. I loved the experience, but I hated the job. It was like a really tough wrestling practice that you hate because it is so challenging, but then after you go through with it you tell all of your wrestler buddies how tough the practice was. It is like you are bragging trying to one up each other on how tough your practices were. However, I realize that even though what I did was challenging for me that there are people who do tougher things than I did every single day, and not once do they complain about it. They just do it because that is what they do. Maybe someday I can be as tough as those people.
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Posted in Personal | Tags: greco roman wrestling, hydrovac, Justin Ruiz, olympic wrestling, wyoming | 1 Comment »
Three Tournaments That Crushed Me And How I Came Back To Win
Wrestling is tough. It takes a mountain of physical, mental, and emotional effort. For some reason though once wrestling gets in your blood it is hard to stay away from it for too long. There is just something special. Something about going toe to toe with someone else and taking them down and scoring points. It is just fun. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. It is easy to love the sport when you are winning, but when you are losing it is easy to start questioning whether all of your effort is worth it. It is tough to take a severe beat down and then get up and get back to work. I am going to tell you about three tournaments where I got handed some severe beat downs.
My freshman year of high school I joined a wrestling club to continue training in the off season. I wanted to get better, and I was fortunate enough to have been recruited by Greg Williams to join his wrestling club. The club was called Elite, and there were a lot of the better kids in the state that wrestled for him. He actually coaches Utah Valley University’s wrestling team now as the head coach. It was this club that enabled me to start looking for competition at higher and higher levels. Greg really pushed us to make sure that we would go to the bigger tournaments to get an idea of how good we could be if we were willing to dedicate ourselves and really work at it. One of the tournaments that we were encouraged to go to was the Rocky Mountain Regional that was held at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. It was the first regional that I had ever been to.
When we got to the tournament, I felt pretty confident that I was going to do well. I had just taken 4th place at the state championship, and I felt like I was getting better and better all of the time. I weighed in and was ready to get wrestling the next day. My first match, I wrestled a big strong kid from Colorado. He was really barrel chested, and it looked like he had spent plenty of time in the weight room. We started wrestling, and I could immediately tell that he was quite a bit stronger than I was. It didn’t take him much time before he had scored 10 points on me to the 0 that I had scored on him. That ended the match. I was upset that I had been beaten so badly and I was ready to wrestle again so that I could redeem myself. My next match came up a little while after my loss, and I was up against a wrestler from Montana. I was sure that I was going to win that match. I was determined to not get eliminated from the tournament in the first two rounds. However, my determination was not what was required to win that match. I needed to score points, but I didn’t. I also lost to the wrestler from Montana by 10 point margin, and I was devastated. I couldn’t believe that there were kids out there that were that much better than me. I consoled myself with the thought that the competition had been in the Greco roman style of wrestling which I didn’t have much experience with at the time. I told myself that the next day we would be wrestling freestyle which is more similar to the type of wrestling that I had been doing in school, and I would be ready to win.
The next day came and I warmed up and got ready for my matches. Somehow, I had drawn the exact same wrestlers that I had already wrestled the previous evening. I didn’t let the fact that they had already beaten me to intimidate me. I felt like I was going to be wrestling them in my stronger style, and i was ready for some revenge. This time around I wrestled the kid from Montana first. He destroyed me. Apparently he was better at freestyle than he was at greco too. I tried to shrug off the loss, but shortly thereafter, I wrestled the competitor from Colorado. He kicked my butt too, and I was officially 0-4 for the two tournaments. In fact, I hadn’t even scored a single point during the competition. I felt as about as bad as I could about my performance, and I really started to question whether or not I was any good at wrestling. Those two tournaments were definitely an eye opener. I felt sorry for myself for a little bit, and then I went back to work.
The next time that I went back to that tournament, I was the one that was putting the beat down on the wrestlers, and the following year I won both styles. I didn’t give up, and I came back stronger.
Fast forward quite a few years down the road. I was wrestling in Dortmund, Germany for my first senior level international tournament. I had made the U.S. National team that year, and I was excited to start wrestling internationally. I wanted to be the best at the highest level and this tournament was an opportunity to start doing that. I weighed in and got ready to wrestle the next day. The next morning I saw the draw that I had pulled. I had Czech Republic, Sweden, and Russia in my pool. I was ready to wrestle all of them and see how I could do.
My first match was against the Russian. I always wanted to beat a Russian, and now it was my chance. I went out on the mat and was ready to give him all he could handle. At the end of the match the score was 9-1. He had taken me down, turned me, lifted me, and done pretty much anything that he wanted to. It was a tough loss. I still had two more matches so I wanted to make the most of them. I wrestled the Swede next, and he beat me in similar fashion. However, I wasn’t able to score a point. My final match was against the Czech who also shut me out. I had traveled half way across the world to get beaten in three matches and only score 1 point. I was pretty bummed about my performance. I once again was questioning whether or not that I had what it took to be able to wrestle at that level. I did the only thing that I could do. I went back to working on getting better and improving myself. I had taken beatings before and survived. I wanted to be good.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I had an incredibly tough draw. The Russian was a world champ. The Swede ended up as the world champ a few months later, and the Czech was a multiple world medalist. I had wrestled some tough hombres. It gave me some insight as to what I needed to do to get better. Fast forward several years later, and I was able to see that yes I could compete at that level. I was able to have won 7 national titles, compete on 6 world teams, win 5 pan american titles, earn a world bronze medal, and be a part of the world championship winning team. I was able to become one of the best in the world because I didn’t give up after I had taken a beating. That is how you get good. You don’t give up just because something doesn’t work out the first, or second, or fifth try. You just get up, dust yourself off, and go back to work. Thomas Edison made over 1000 attempts at the light bulb, Colonel Saunders didn’t get KFC going until he was in his 60′s, Abe Lincoln didn’t win the presidency until he had failed at nearly everything that he had done. You don’t give up just because you fail.
So the next time you get beat, shrug it off. Everyone else has been there before, and if you keep working hard and smart at what you are doing, you will get better. Use your losses as lessons and turn them into learning. I know that is a long string of l’s, but it is the truth.
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Posted in Personal | Tags: greco roman wrestling, Justin Ruiz, olympic wrestling, world champion, wrestling competition | 1 Comment »