Final Essay

Dylan Stiner

English 1510

13 November 2013

Wrestling with Adolescence

            Throughout the course of my life, I have always been a hyperactive, impatient person and was driven by my own impulse. It was very easy for me to make new friends because I had a good sense of humor, but it was also very easy to lose them because I didn’t think before I acted. I never seemed to stay in a group of friends for more than a year or so and had trouble slowing down enough to realize what I was doing to the people around me, and how it made them view Dylan Stiner. I was very spunky and slightly cocky. I could have been considered the class clown because it seemed I always had some sort of remark to embellish on the class during a lecture. It seemed to work for me and I was never afraid to tell anyone what I actually thought of them. My world back then revolved around my athletic extra-curricula’s, and that’s where most of my effort and confidence went into, and where I developed my social interactions. I made a point to use constructive competition with my teammates, which is where individuals that give 100% effort, force the rest of the team to push themselves to keep up. The only problem with putting forth the maximum effort is that my teammates and friends are lazy, and just strive to give the minimal work possible, they tend to oppress you. I felt the ambition of my teammates to make me an outcast, but it all started with one kid who was determined to fight me. After I won the fight in the locker room, I was congratulated by a few friends, but the rest of the team didn’t bother. Instead, they just spread rumors around the school and were committed to making me look like a hack. I was torn between my social life and athletics, which were always treated as one group in my youth. Once I reached adolescence although, my world was flip-turned upside down and I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t.

            As time went on, I felt the full oppression as the outcast member of the athletic group and went through a transition from hyper and impulsive, to depression and deep thought. All of my close friends had tossed me away for fear of the same treatment by the group I was ousted from. I didn’t even know where to turn, but my father had been pressuring me to join wrestling that year instead of trying out for basketball because we both had known that I sucked at basketball. I went through with it and went to the first week of practice. I found that it was an extremely difficult sport, and it made me enjoy it even more. It may have been just a release of tension, but I loved the feeling of a regulated, legal fight, as wrestling is. Eventually, a nice quite baseball game couldn’t even hold my attention from the excitement that I experienced in wrestling. It provoked me to drop all my other sports because I didn’t get along with my old friends on the team, and my new friends were into wrestling. Although, my team only consisted of five members, those five friends on my middle school wrestling squad ended up being the best people I have ever met in my life. After the wrestling season, my old “friends” were still neglectful towards me and one of the followers in the group were talked into provoking me to fight. After about a week or two of avoiding the fight, I went into the bathroom and was surrounded by people and the kid that wanted to fight was front and center. Another kid grabbed my arms and held them behind my back as the one started to punch me. I elbowed the kid holding me down and leveled the other boy. After 3 days of suspension, I had actually earned their respect and they never bothered me again. It was a relaxation point in my youth, and everyone seemed to get off my back. The kid that had fought me actually became a close friend of mine after that. In eighth grade, my wrestling season opened with a bang and I won the first two tournaments, to start my season out at sixteen and zero (16-0). I had felt almost unstoppable and on top of the world, until eventually I hit a brick wall.

Right in the climax of the wrestling season in eighth grade, I was given some devastating news. My mom had sat me and my little brother, who is only about a year younger than myself, at the table to “discuss something.” Naturally at this age, we both think we are in some kind of deep trouble and are anxiously awaiting to see what the our sentence would be. Neither of us were ready for what she said next. The words, “My breast cancer has returned, and it’s in stage 4,” seemed to scroll across my eyelids at night like subtitles to a video. I can finally admit to myself now that I was very angry, but back then I would have never admitted it. I would have said “I’m sad but I understand.” This was far from the truth, because I didn’t understand at all. I took out my anger at wrestling practices and I wasn’t just out to win after that, I was out for blood. My ultimate goal was to make the kid scream from my strength, and to put him in so much pain that he would rather just pin himself than have me help him. My teammates had taught me this tactic but at this point in my life I used it for the wrong reasons. I was carrying the emotional weight of my mother’s illness on my own shoulders and it was hard to deal with. I had lost all faith in God and blamed him because my father had prostate cancer the year before and this was the second time my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. If there were a god, how can he do that to kids? I dealt with the possible of death of both my parent three times. Wrestling at least kept my mind cool and I was able to release my tension somewhere without someone getting hurt. I ended my season at (26-2) that year but the loss against the same kid twice seemed to eat away at me. I worked extremely hard that offseason to prepare for high school. In the off-season my mother was being treated with chemotherapy and lost all of her hair, on top of surgery to remove her breasts. I became a social hermit and would always stay around the house to make sure she was okay. Just being near her made me subconsciously feel more comfortable with her situation. My cousin who lived 5 houses down became my best friend and his presence at my house became a normal occurrence. He looked at my mother as his second mom and we had lived that close to each other our whole lives.

As time continued on though, high school had started. To my surprise, many of my peers were becoming much more mature and accepting, so in turn my social life became much broader, although I still didn’t like being too far from home. My high school wrestling team had become a second family to me, because we all suffered in practice together as a team, and we all shared the glory of winning a tournament or dual together as a team. It was the first team I had been a part of that actually pushed each other competitively to get better. We were enemies when the coach blew the whistle, and friends when the practice was over. I felt the ambition to achieve greatness amongst the entire team, especially in the lower weight classes. Wrestling is all about having the competitive edge and to succeed, you need to be self-efficient, and have high personal goals to strive for (Kane par. 19). The Spangler twins who wrestled the two weight above me throughout high school became two of my best friends and role models. They saw great potential in my and pushed me hard to help me realize that potential. They had made it to state all 4 years in high school and they both placed three of the four years. The lowest high school weight class is 103 pounds, which was where Brian Spangler and I had both wrestled my freshman year. His brother William Spangler wrestled at 112 and our 119 pounder wasn’t that good. We had agreed to bump them to 112 and 119 for dual meets because I was the still the second best in the county other than Brian, and even got to prove it when I pinned the kid that was number two in the county behind Brian. At the tournaments, I was put in as an extra wrestler, or wrestling unattached from a team meaning I cannot score team points, and Brian and I had made it to the finals to wrestle each other for 1^st and 2^nd in all three of the tournaments. The newspapers had several articles about these events because they’re unheard of. Normally, only varsity wrestlers even have a chance to make it to the finals in a 16-20 team tournament, and when there are two kids from the same school, in the same weight class, wrestling in the finals, it draws a lot of attention. It raised my confidence as a high school wrestler, although I didn’t have a chance to wrestle for the state series because I wasn’t the “varsity” wrestler at that weight, although I still lettered varsity for outstanding performance and finished out my freshman season at (20-3). This season had a huge impact on my social life because I had regularly cut more than 12 pounds a week to make my weight class, and then would instantly gained that weight and more back initially after weigh ins. My time in school was spent running in trash bags during lunch and study hall, and feeling completely dead and nonfunctional during class. I couldn’t even find the energy to keep my head up off my desk. I had felt like a walking corpse and looked like it too. My peers would feel awful for me even though in my mind it was just another week of cutting weight. If I were given the chance to do it all over again, I probably would. It taught me valuable life lessons that I couldn’t have learned anywhere else, and helped me perspire in anything I would do from that point on. It made me work hard to reach a goal, and taught me that if you want something bad enough, no matter how difficult the task may be, hard work can get you there. Working hard isn’t the only aspect to achieving a goal though. Self-discipline is required to ensure success. If you can be disciplined enough to not drink that bottle of water, or if you do drink the water, to be disciplined enough to own up to it and run on the treadmill afterwards, then and only then will your hard work, patience, and self-discipline pay off. To actually follow through with your goals and discipline can be very difficult when you’re a pound over the night before a tournament, and you haven’t had a sip of water or an ounce of food in two days. You feel a warm, empty burning deep within your stomach, and your energy is so low that walking to the bathroom feels like hiking Mt. Everest. Your thoughts become overwhelmingly negative and life seems unfair. You stare at the clock, just praying that time will move faster and before you know it you’ll be at the scale, ready to eat. This never happens though. It seems that when you have no sustenance in your body, a full night’s sleep is almost impossible. You wake up in burning pain because your body is so empty that it’s begging for water. After nearly the longest two to three days of your life, you finally indulge so much food that you can’t even walk, and after the tournament or meet, it all starts over again the next week. These were the horrible times during the wrestling season, but they made everything worth it when your hand is raised and you stand atop of the podium. No one else could say that they worked to be a champion, except for those who were disciplined enough, and worked hard enough to do so. That is the true glory of wrestling. No one can determine your fate but your own personal will. 

As if cutting weight weren’t already a difficult enough task to mentally cope with, but halfway through my freshman season, my mother had started to feel out of it. She had a port put in and was going through full bore chemotherapy. My father had just gone out of town with his friends to Michigan for a snowmobiling trip, and I had my cousin Kendle over for the weekend. My mother had started to get a fever and was sleeping for about 24 hours, from Friday night to Saturday night. She wasn’t feeling very great and I could tell so I talked to her for a little bit and noticed that her answers were very off base. I felt her fore head and she was on fire, like hotter than anyone I’ve ever felt before. My cousin called his mom to come down the street, and I convinced my mom to go to the hospital after her delusional responses finally subsided. Five minutes after she got to the hospital she went into septic shock and the doctors had no idea why. They knew it was an infection because it fit all the symptoms but they couldn’t find the exact diagnosis until five or six days later. I’ve always imagined Dr. House sitting at his desk, trying to solve my mom’s case and it makes me laugh to think about it now. The doctors said that if we wouldn’t have gotten my mom to the hospital when we did, she wouldn’t be here right now. I had been dealing with that reality for more than a year and the sepsis was an extremely close call. I’ve always tried to act tough and not let things like that get to me but I was pretty scared for my mom’s life when they couldn’t figure out what it was. Even when I almost drowned from lock joint hypothermia as kid, I still didn’t act scared, although I couldn’t really breathe. In short, my father tried to cross a “crick” that another group had just crossed in front of us while we were snowmobiling in Canada. My brother and I were on the sled with my father, and we roughly 6 and 7 years old (me being the older brother). When my dad crossed it, the little crick turned out to be a fifteen foot deep trench that was about thirty meters in length and we had our helmets, snow suits, jackets and other apparel on when we were plunged into the 0 degree water. Luckily for us there was remote house half a mile back from our position that we were able to go to after. Before that though, my brothers’ feet came off the snowmobile while we were in the water, he freaked out and started grabbing on to me and I thought we were both going to drown because our arms were almost motionless. It is the reason I hate the cold weather today and the reason that I will never learn to love snow. I have never felt that helpless in my entire life.

Another reason I have to despise the winter season would be cutting weight. When you’re losing vast amounts of weight through dehydration and slight starvation, your body fat percentage drops to accommodate the new muscles from the sport you play but also it drops from the lack of fat and nutrients. In short, your muscles get smaller and more defined, but you’re stronger than you were before and you weigh less. This puts your muscles, nerves and bones closer to the skin surface which means you get cold quicker, and because calories are increments of energy that burn more quickly in the winter to keep you warm (much like a wood burner will use more wood in the winter than in the fall to heat a house), the low calorie intake puts your body in a state of conservation. My body would store as much as could to supply me with energy to practice, but wouldn’t burn off the extra calories to keep me warm because I had no calories to spare. This forced me to wear two long sleeve shirts and a sweatshirt to school every day because I was always freezing cold. Being cold with no energy are two of the worst experiences I have ever experienced in my life. Having to cut weight isn’t exactly a problem although. When you cut large amounts of weight to reach a goal, it pushes you that much harder to reach a goal in match and gives you a mental advantage over your opponent because in your mind, you have worked that much harder to get where you are (Pettersson par. 4). I had finally had enough of my own self stupidity of cutting weight my sophomore year that I had decided to change. I would eat and drink, but only in moderation. I would constantly check my weight and I would set goals for myself during a tournament to only eat and drink what my body needed to achieve maximum performance. It didn’t allow me to eat everything I wanted the day of weigh-ins but in the long run, I was much happier only cutting 4-5 pounds a week rather than 11-12, and I had energy during the week. For me to do this, I needed to be motivated and disciplined to not eat everything I put my eyes on. I did this with great success and my life at school seemed to be a lot more focused on course work than cutting weight. At practice, I was able to better focus on my technique and work ethic rather than how much weight I had to loose. My junior and senior seasons on the wrestling team were much easier on me mentality and my drive to be champion was higher than ever before.

My junior season started off with two tournament wins. I had beat a 4th ranked opponent in my weight class by a point and had beaten another kid that made it to state the previous year 6-1. Needless to say I was pumped and ready for anything. The annual Brakeman Report came out that year and I was ranked at #8 in the state. Two days after, I suffered from a severe high ankle sprain and was out for 4-6 weeks, although I came back in 3 weeks. I would learn to regret this still today because just as easily as it happened the first time, it happened again. Although at this point in the season, I couldn’t just sit back and wait for it to heal, so I choose to continue and battle through the pain. This is where mental toughness comes in. To push through pain and suffering in a match, you need to be mentally tough enough to forget about the pain, and focus on your main goal, and to take it one match at a time (Drees par. 25). A few weeks after that, I was wrestling the kid that was ranked #5 from Manchester, the score was (0-0) in the second period, and then I popped out my knee. I had never been so upset in my whole life. Everything I had worked for, all the time and effort I had put in seemed to be just a waste of time. I decided to take two weeks off to let my let my knee heal, but the week I came back was already sectionals week. I had only two weeks to prepare for districts and I had the toughest weight class of any district. Seven kids in the top 18 were fighting for four spots to state. In my go to match, I didn’t have enough steam to continue and I could tell that two weeks off killed my conditioning. I came back to be the State Alternate which is still making it to state, but you don’t have the luxury of wrestling in the state tournament. I was devastated, angry, sad, and any other form of pain, I had it. I don’t like to show those emotions publicly at all, and I felt as though everyone was staring at my weld up eyes, just waiting for me to ball. I did but it wasn’t until I got into the locker room and punched a few lockers first. I sat and thought about everything, how unfair it was that I couldn’t show my true talent on the mat without sheering pain in my legs. I had vowed that next year was my year to rebound and show everyone what I was truly made of.

In the first tournament of my senior year, I didn’t have match last longer than a minute until the semi-finals. I had thrown the kid with a hip toss and set it perfectly, it was about to be over. The kid pushed up on my face and got some space, and went to roll through the pinning combo. As he rolled I felt and heard a giant pop and tear within my neck. I let the kid take me over to prevent any more tearing and bridged out so I could stop the match. I showed my coach where I heard the pop at my neck/collar bone was huge. I had just torn my sternoclavical joint that connects the chest sternum to the collar bone and completely dislocated my collar bone. I tried to finish the match but the pain suddenly became so intense that I couldn’t bear the weight of my own shoulder. I was actually winning the match still when I forfeited but I’m glad I did. The doctor said that because I continued the match, I ended up rupturing the growth plate which is the source of the intense, pulsing pain, but also tore a ligament that runs through your neck to the back of your skull that takes forever to heal. It is overall an eight week injury and my mind was already drifting back to the previous season’s hardships. I had been extremely disappointed in myself because it was my fault. I usually am much stronger than everyone I wrestled, and I hit a stupid throw that was the cause of my injury. When I finally started to practice again, it was already the last week of January and districts was 3 weeks away. I worked extremely hard to try and get my conditioning back to stage it was in before my injury, which I knew was impossible but I wanted to get in the best shape I could because when your wrestling head to head against someone of equal talent, you could be dead tired after a minute, but on a kid that is just a little worse than you, you could use the same effort and go six minutes no problem. At districts, I had to wrestle my drill partner in the off season Mike Hozan from Black River for my first match. He had placed at state the previous two years, but I had never lost a match to him until this day. He beat me 5-3 and put me in the consolation bracket. I had to win 5 matches to make it to state and I did just that. I won my go to match 14-3 and lost to Mike again for 3^rd and fourth in overtime 3-2. I had nothing left in that overtime period and couldn’t find the energy to win. At state, I was winning my first match 6-2 against the kid that took 5^th, when he caught me with an awesome arm bar and stuck me with 1 second left in the second period. Then I went to the consolation side and pinned my next opponent after a 14-2 lead for my 100^th career win. I needed to win one more match to place, and it was against my good friend, Mike. At the end of the second period, I was exhausted but I had a 7-2 lead. I was so excited, but he wasn’t ready to give up yet. His coach knew of my previous injury and knew I wasn’t in the best of shape and told mike to just take shot after shot to wear me down and when there was about a minute left he got a takedown and made it 7-4. He let me up, 8-4, and got another takedown, cheaply might I add because I was out of bounds but 8-6 score. Let me up again 9-6 and gets a clean takedown with two back points in the last couple of seconds. All in one minute because I didn’t have the gas in my tank to win it. He ended up winning the match 10-9. I was already balling my eyes out before I even shook his hand. Everything I had fought so hard to achieve, every sacrifice I made, every waking moment spent in hard work pursuit of standing on the state podium, was all for nothing. Nothing at all but a piece of paper that says ‘participant’ and the memories of what could have been.

My adolescence was very rough time in my life. I had many challenges to face and even more that I needed to overcome. My peers in middle school showed me that you can’t let the little things get to you, but also taught me to be more cautious with whom I open up to because people that aren’t good natured will use your personal feelings against you. It made me become very closed up with my emotions and to get me to physically express any deep emotion is extremely rare. These people were all my teammates from my football and baseball team, and is the reason that I joined wrestling in the first place. The negative events pushed me into the most life changing sport I would ever tackle and made me the person I am today. My ambition to win from my first match to the last match never changed and without the constant tormenting from my other teammates, I may never have given wrestling a chance and I might not even be at college today. I believe it has had that much of an effect on my life. When my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer, it too had a huge impact on my life. It forced me to face my most harsh emotions but also taught me self-responsibility because I couldn’t have my mom help me through every situation and my father had to work a lot. Also being a very hyper child and always getting into trouble, once I reached a freshman in high school, I no longer wanted to get punished for everything I did and my mom wasn’t able to help me out of certain situations. I feel as though it made me mature more quickly than my peers, not physically but mentally. I also was very self-motivated to succeed in my wrestling and knew that if I had the will to win, I could be a champion. Being self-motivated can get you through the hardest times in your life and make you a stronger person. I was also very mentally strong because when I was forced to cut large amounts of weight, I had to show great amounts of self-discipline which taught me very valuable lessons in my life. It showed me that with the right amount of discipline, anything and I mean anything is possible. I was training to be great and was determined to become a state champion. My junior and season seasons in high school taught me to face challenges and helped me overcome failure because sometimes there are obstacles in life that just can’t be changed, and the only thing you can do is continue to fight through them even if it means fighting through the pain. The only option you have is to give it all you have and if you can’t be happy with your best, then you’ll never overcome a loss. Overcoming a loss is what builds personal pride and mental strength, and although it took me awhile to find myself after State my senior year, I knew that deep down, with all the obstacles I was forced to overcome in my life, nothing could break my pride. Inside, I feel as though I’m still a champion and I will never truly fail at anything in life even if I come up short of my own personal goals.    

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Drees, Mandi J. An Examination of Mental Toughness over the Course of a Competitive Season.

            Journal of Sport Behavior, Dec. 2013. Web. 19 November 2013.

Kane, Thomas D. Self-Efficacy, Personal Goals, and Wrestlers Self-Regulation. Journal of Sport

            And Exercise Psychology, 1996. Web. 18 November 2013.

Pettersson, Stefan. Practices of Weight Regulation Among Athletes in Combat Sports: A Matter

            Of Mental Advantage. Journal of Athletic Training, Jan. 2013. Web. 18 November 2013.