(Photo by Daniel Harris/Stanford Athletics)
Stanford's 184lber Zack Giesen
Zack Giesen, the 184lber for the Stanford Cardinal, will team up with D1CW and keep a running blog this year. He will give us a window into the life of a DI wrestler, in-season. Zack returns to the mat this season, after taking a redshirt in the 2008-09 season. A two-time NCAA qualifier for the Cardinal, Giesen enters the 2009-10 season ranked #15 in the nation by D1CW.
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It has been quite a while since I have last written. I got caught up in school and wrestling so much at the end of last quarter that time just seemed to fly by. I had several things that I wanted to write about but I didn’t have time to put the metaphorical pen to paper. As it is now, I don’t have time to write this, but it’s a lot better than doing a physics problem set. A lot has happened since I last wrote, and I could go on forever trying to detail everything. In summary, the season has had its ups and downs, for me and for the team both. I followed one of my worst matches ever with a pretty good showing at the Reno TOC, but I still felt like I left a lot on the mat. From there, we had a few days off for Christmas before heading out to Midlands. I was definitely disappointed with my performance at Midlands and have let that feeling fuel me these past couple of weeks. Now though, it seems like the season is kinda winding down. The Pac-10 tournament is a month away and the only thing between then and now is a few dual meets. It is nice to be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Ever since last March, I’ve been preparing for the NCAA tournament, but sometimes it is easy to lose focus in middle of the season when your body gets worn down and your struggling to stay on top of your studies.
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At times I start counting down days until the season is over and that is the most dangerous attitude that an athlete can develop. Now though, a new quarter has started and once again my goals have become clear and I’m looking forward to finishing off the season strong and being in the best situation possible come March.
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At Stanford we are on the quarter system, which I really like, but it also makes for a busy schedule. It seems like the quarter has barely started and we already have our first round of midterms. I have some very interesting classes this winter that I really enjoy. I am taking a human physiology class that is by far my favorite class that I have taken here. It is a pretty difficult class because it is very in depth and requires a solid understanding of biology and how it applies to the human body, but it is fascinating. The human body has always amazed me and to be able to study how it works in depth is truly remarkable. It makes all the hours of organic chemistry and biochemistry worth it. Speaking of which, I am taking my last organic chemistry course ever (hopefully), unfortunately it involves sitting in lab for 5 hours at a time watching stuff boil (they don’t even let me play with the explosive chemicals). That might have been a little off topic, but it is a quick look into the student part of student-athletes.
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Well, it is the start of a busy week and hopefully I will be able to write a little more this quarter, but right now, I am going to finish up a physics problem set and hope to get a little sleep before morning practice.
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Well, it has been a long time since I have written. I was hoping to sit down and write something intellectual and inspiring, but unfortunately, even when I have the time, I am neither. Instead this will probably be bumbling and awkward. The past couple weeks have been ridiculously busy for me, and probably every other student athlete in the country. We have officially started competing so making weight now becomes a lifestyle instead of some far-off nightmare that I don’t want to think about. When traveling, making weight, and practice are combined with midterms, a person has very little time remaining for unnecessary activities. As it is, I don’t have enough time to do everything I should. I have started multi-tasking though, and I think I’m doing a pretty good job of managing things. Since I would never get to sleep if I did all the reading and studying that I am supposed to, I have combined reading and sleeping. I sleep with my physics book underneath my pillow, and based on the scores from my last midterm, I think I need to sleep more. I am not completely joking about this. The other day I got home from practice and sat down to read about a little heterocycle synthesis and woke up two hours later, facedown in my textbook. Since the concentration of organic chemistry info in my head was considerably less than that in the book, I should have absorbed information via osmosis, but apparently it is a slow process that is better achieved through active transport or needs some sort of catalyst.
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You probably don’t want to read about me complaining about school though; nobody really cares about school anyways (other than the NCAA, they make you pass classes and stuff, and won't let you take 12 units of PE classes or my schedule would consist of beach volleyball (yeah, we can play beach volleyball all year around in California (try playing beach volleyball in January in Iowa), maybe yoga (ya, we do yoga in California too), and to round out my schedule, I’d probably go with Eskrima, (I don’t even know what Eskrima is, but it’s on our course listing and it sounds cool). If my schedule looked like that I would probably be playing football at Florida or something through). Sorry, I lost my focus again and used way too many parentheses in order to avoid using actual punctuation marks, instead creating a run-on sentence about absolutely nothing. If you haven't noticed I have a really hard time staying focused on a single subject; it makes studying incredibly difficult. Anyways, nobody really cares about school. I mean you have your whole life to get an education; you only have 4 years to wrestle. On to actual wrestling information. The team competed at the Northwestern duals this last weekend and went 3-0 with wins over Purdue, Northwestern, and Northern Iowa. It was a good weekend and I was really excited to be a part of a team that went in there with a lot of young kids, but expected to win all of the duals anyways. It is an attitude that I think signifies a change of culture for Stanford wrestling, and I am excited to be a part of that change. I am looking forward to seeing how the team grows this season with so many young guys in the lineup and where we will be by the end of the season. I could delve into this subject way deeper, but I think that will be saved for another time (delve is a cool word, Tolkien used it in LOTR so I thought I would try and through it in here). We have Thanksgiving week off from school so I will try and put something together over that time that you might actually care about. As it is, it is late, we have morning practice tomorrow, and I have a biology lab write-up to do (which I will most likely put off until the last minute and end up writing in between matches this weekend). Oh, I Wikipediaed Eskrima; it's a Filipino (why is it Filipino when they are form the Philippines, am I missing out on some linguistic law) martial art where you hit people with sticks. It other words, its total awesomeness that makes you feel like your 7 again.
P.S. I am the world’s worst beach volleyball player and I don’t actually do yoga, two more reasons why I don’t fit in very well in California
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So, I am supposed to write a blog about anything I want, which is easier said than done. This is like one of those assignments where your professor/teacher is like “you can write about anything you want”. For me those are the hardest assignments, I mean, give me something to write about and I will struggle through and produce something legible, but when I have no direction to even start off with I am completely lost. That is where I am at right now, so I am going to preemptively apologize if this makes no sense whatsoever, or it is not what you where hoping for. I am also going to apologize for any grammatical or punctual mistakes. I am a biology major so I don’t get (more like have) to write many papers. My life consists of studying different chemical reactions and knowing why the human body does what it does. The latter is incredibly interesting, the former, well it is why I hate organic chemistry. I was told not to ramble, but I think that is what I am doing right now so I will try and focus (which is incredibly difficult for me to do by the way).
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I have read several other blogs about people detailing their preseason training and I have concluded that the preseason is pretty much the same no matter where you go. Quite frankly, it sucks, (I don’t know if that is acceptable or not but I think it aptly describes the preseason). Every team gets up early, conditions in some unique and tortuous way, and in the afternoon there is “open room”. I am not even going to go into details about how open room works. When combined with the first several weeks of school the preseason makes for long days and shorter nights, inevitably leading to sleep deprivation and an incredible reliance on caffeine. However, I had an epiphany this year. I realized that I love the preseason; that I wouldn’t know what to do without it. I would complain to my roommate about how hard our workouts were and how they were so early and he would comment back “you know you like it”. I would laugh and make some sarcastic comment, until about two weeks into the year I realized he was right. The idea that I was up at 5:45 in the morning getting ready to do hill sprints or a plate workout was somehow, in a sick and twisted way, appealing to me. I relished the fact that nobody on campus was up as early as me, and if they were, they weren’t working as hard as I was. This realization made life so much more enjoyable. Morning workouts were no longer a necessary evil; they were an opportunity to get better, a chance to separate myself from my competition. Sure everybody has morning workouts, but I know (truthfully or not, this is an incredibly important part of the psychological part of wrestling in my mind that will have to be discussed at some future time because I am rambling again) that I am getting more out of them than my competition. This perspective motivates me to push through that lovely feeling that comes from oxygen deprivation and exhaustion when we have a hard workout.
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This doesn’t mean that I am not grumpy when Porfirio tries to cradle me at 6:00 in the morning as I’m trying to stretch or that I don’t groan when Coach Borrelli says we are running 800’s (cause 800’s are the worst thing ever, on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from Smarties). But when it comes down to that point where things hurt and I have the choice in my mind to either push on or let off, I like to think that I make the decision to push on because I know that pushing on is what will make me a better wrestler in the long run. I think that this mentality is why I wrestle. Very few, if any, other sports require such a mentality that enjoys putting oneself through pain as much as wrestling. This is not to say that there aren’t other incredibly difficult sports out there, I just think that most don’t require the level of “craziness” as some members of our football team put it, that wrestling does.
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Well I think I have rambled for way to long. This is what happens when you let a science person sit down and write, they ramble incoherently for days.
-Zack Giesen