So...

Wasn't going to blog just yet but I am getting sick of looking at multiple icons from the same blogger all the time, so here we go.  :)

Hope everyone had a good holiday weekend.  I did pretty good on the diet front, I wouldn't call what I did so much "cheating" as I would call it "eating more than normal".  And that, folks, is championship caliber rationalization.  Bask in its awesomeness for a moment.  Aaaaaah.  But in all seriousness I did pretty good, better than I figured I would, and the weigh-in this morning reflected that.

Speaking of weight, seems that I'm at a plateau again.  I started back on the L-Carnitine a few weeks ago and as always that seemed to kick start the weight loss.  But after a few weeks it seems to level off, so I'm doing a cycle type deal with it where I won't take it again for maybe a month or so.  That seems to be effective for me so far.  I'm still a bit short of that ellusive 100lb mark for weight loss.  I'm currently 18lbs above my initial target weight loss for the end of 2011.  I mentioned before I'm pretty sure I won't hit it, but I do think I can squeeze out another 8 pounds by the end of the year.

My son had his first wrestling matches of the year and did really well.  He had a quad meet (4 teams, round robin type deal) that was only about an hour away so of course I made the drive down to watch.  I didn't get to spend time with him for the holiday, so this was the best I was going to get and it was worth it.  He's worked really hard in both summer camps and hitting the weights and its paying off for him.  He's wrestling at 220 and is weighing in about 209.  Anyway, he won his first match 8-6.  He pulled off some crazy roll-throughs that he couldn't control (first match jitters I'm sure) otherwise he had 2 solid opportunities to pin his guy, but it was a good win and a good start to the season.  His next match was against a kid who I'm pretty sure is ranked in their weight class.  I think lack of conditioning (being that its early in the season) was a factor for both my son and this other kid, but this was definitely a winnable match.  My son was down 4-3 with about 20 seconds left and the other kid was stalling out, trying to kill the clock, so my son went for broke and wound up getting caught and put on his back.  He gave up 4 points at the end, and wound up losing 8-3.  That was an excellent match.  The third match...well, this is the kind of thing you dread as a parent.

The kid my son wrestled in his final match was obviously unclear on what the sport of wrestling means.  Its not the stuff you see Vince McMahon put on tv every week.  Hey, I love that stuff too...but this is the real sport here.  He was also a low-class thug, having been pinned by the kid my son lost to in the first period and being out in the concession area screaming about the ref and dropping F bombs everywhere.  Classy.  Their whole team was low-class to be honest, all the way down to their coaches.  So in this other kid's second match he tried several times to bumrush the other kid and then shove him into the bleachers.  He did this 2 or 3 times, and the next time he tried it the other kid planted and side stepped him, throwing the punk into the bleachers instead.  This was the only match going on at the time, and the place erupted in cheers when this happened.  But of course this kid's coaches went ballistic.  Um, yeah...you didn't have a problem with your guy doing it though.  The kid kept up his antics though, and I was a bit surprised the ref didn't DQ him.  But he was overly aggressive and burned himself out by the middle of the second period, and he wound up getting pinned again.

So obviously I'm concerned because now my son has to wrestle this asshole.  I was talking to my son before his match with one of his coaches and we were helping him plan a strategy out to use this guy's aggressiveness against him.  He showed literally no wrestling moves at all...he just rushed the kid and pushed him when he was out of bounds.  So my son decided the best way to handle this would be to block his rushing and frustrate him, and just wait for him to make a mistake.  Did it work?  See for yourself:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi0-tgO-FPw[/youtube]

As you can see he tried that crap with my son as well, and to my son's credit it didn't phase him at all.  So his season's off to a good start.  Unfortunately most of his matches are well downstate so I probably won't get to see him wrestle again until conference at the end of January.  But the good news is his Regionals are in Joliet this year, and thats pretty much my back yard.  :)