I ended up lasting 3 weeks in Minnesota until I had issues that most certainly needed to be taken care of by going home and resetting. I don't care much to go into full detail, except that it was a very emotional time for me and that looking back 3 months later, I made the appropriate choice. While at home my main focus was getting my head on straight and staying in shape until I could figure out what my passion in life really was.

I ended up taking a 3 week vacation to London to play some poker and do something adventurous, while trying to make money. The highlight of my trip was getting deep into the $5k PLO and getting reseated at Tom Dwan's table with a ton of chips. Unsuprisingly he didn't know who I was until Shaun Deeb said something rhetorical about "Who's the bigger sicko?" Obviously Tom gave the lolimtomdwanandyouarejustsomerandomtournykidwhogot8thinthesundaymillionlastweek look. 30 minutes later me and Tom were double crossbooked for prize money. 13 hours later Tom is allin with top set for half the chips in play, but loses. I ended up getting 12th after the chip leader(Jani villumen sp?) raises utg 6-handed and I 3-bet AAxxdd on the button, he calls. Flop is T9ddx and he check shoves with top set. It sucks that I was like 1.5x average and had a very good feel for the rest of the fields tendencies. Jani won the pot and knocked me out and ended up winning the tournament the next day. I felt like I rolled a 7 with a lot of money on the table : [

When I got home I had a very long talk with my coach about my body, wrestling, and life. I've had a strong desire and passion for wrestling since that talk and a month later I made my way back up to Minnesota to resume my career. That's not to say a lot went on between August and November because I feel like a summarized version would be just fine for the character of this blog. I spent 20 days in Minnesota doing nothing but training as I had no internet and little else to do. It concluded with a trip to Chicago where I decided to wrestle in and decided to make a hard cut to 125 pounds. I definately put my body through the test for the weekend and I didn't get any sleep the night before the meet even after taking a sip of nyquil. Unfortunately, my nerves and weight kept me up all night again.

I ended up weighing 124.9 and felt extermely tanked after my first match where I won 15-6. I was a big 125er, but the weight cut, nerves, lack of sleep, and lack of mat time showed. I wrestled mynext match 45 minutes later and went step-for-step with my opponent for 2 minutes until he took me down with a single and pinned me shortly after. My third match I get taken down and twice and get turned twice and start the 2nd period losing 7-2. I get a reversal and back points in the closing seconds of the 2nd and get a takedown with 20 seconds left in the third to win 8-7. My fourth match I hit a fireman's carry to his back and pinnned my opponent in the first period. On my last match of the day I got hip-tossed to my back and got pinned resulting in me getting 5th in a bracket of about 20 wrestlers. All things considered I think I did just OK, but I'm just really excited to have wrestled again and have committment and a feeling of camaderie with teammates and coaches.

I'm going to try to do some interesting things with my blog and I've made a New Year's resolution to write even when I don't want to and to actually respond to PM's. BTW, I really, really want to coach YOU so just PM and holla.



-ash