It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything on here and I feel it’s about time I do. I’ve been “out of action” for a few months now with two shoulder surgeries (one on each shoulder, not two on one). The recovery process is going extremely smoothly and so far it seems as if I might even be back on the mat a head of schedule.

I always thought that I’d have all this free time once I had the surgeries, but much to my surprise, it seems as if I have less time now than I did before. The one good thing is that because I’m on my own schedule, I don’t have anywhere to be at any given time, but I still have just as much, if not more, things that I have to get done each day. With everything I have on my plate, my current schedule mimics my normal (pre-surgery) schedule almost to the hour, it’s funny how these things work out sometimes.

The good news is that I’m finally making good progress on my dissertation. With my classwork being completed and not having wrestling on my schedule, I’m free to spend much more mental energy on it and its pace is therefor increased. I think I’m about a month away from submitting my proposal and twelve to fifteen months away from wrapping everything up. God willing, I’ll have earned my Dr. Greco name by nationals next year.

On another note, wrestling is going on this weekend at the OTC here in Colorado Springs; the Dave Schutlz Memorial International Invitational (something like that). I took some time out of my day yesterday to watch some of the Greco competitors duke it out for the opportunity to be called champion. Watching everyone competing really got me anxious to be back on the mat. It also reminded me that I need to take my time and make sure I’m fully prepared. I witnessed some decent wrestling, I witnessed some really good wrestling, and much in between. All in all it was good to see the guys out there fighting it out. I can’t wait till it’s my turn.

Until next time…

Life is fleeting. Make every moment count. If you’re taking the time to read this, then take the time to tell someone how you feel about them because you might not be able to tomorrow.

Jake Curby you will be missed…

More Info

It’s just about time for me to take off to Denmark (four days and counting) and I’m starting to get a bit excited. We’ve been training hard and really focusing on getting the job done. As it is in life, there are no guarantees in wrestling; all you can do is prepare yourself the best you can and give it all you’ve got when the time comes. I really believe we’ve been doing a great job of working towards a successful outcome and it’ll be interesting to see how things turn out.

One of the things I’ve been planning on doing is creating a special section on my site dedicated to the world championships. I’m planning on posting photos and blogs about what’s going on over there. I’ll make sure it gets taken care of before we take off so I can keep everyone up to date with the happenings of our trip. I’ll post a note with the details as soon as it’s ready to go.

Take care.

UPDATE:

The section created for the 2009 world championships can be found by clicking the link titled “2009 World Championships” on the right, or by clicking HERE

After a couple weeks of working things out the online store for my Dr. Greco shirts is up and running. You can either Click Here to check it out or head over to the Fund Raiser section of my site.

I’ve returned from Poland and I believe that all in all I had a pretty good tournament. I beat a world medalist and a world champion before losing in the finals to a world medalist. In the process of this I earned four stitches above my left eye. They look pretty cool too. All in all I would call that a successful pre-world competition. An article has been posted on USA Wrestling’s website that you can check out if you so chose.

I posted the pics I took here if you’re interested.

News flash! I have my Dr. Greco shirts. I picked them up yesterday and they look great! You can find more information in the Promotional Fund Raising section! Contact me to get one.

Get em while they’re hot!!

http://www.allcustomstores.com/rcjohnson/

I’ve created a section that I will keep updated with information on my shirt. You can look over on the right hand sidebar at the “Promotional Fund Raising” section or you can click here to go directly there.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, I’ve finalized my first t-shirt design!! As I write this I am in the process of getting a good printer to get things printed!! If you couldn’t tell by reading this, I’m pretty excited about everything. I’m also simultaneously working out how to do the sales portion of this endeavor. My idea for the shirt is to raise money for tournament travel and other wrestling related expenditures.

For the design of this shirt I enlisted the help of my former teammate and great friend Paul Johnson over at www.spintopdesigns.com. Without his help I doubt I could have created such a cool design. If you’re ever in need of any sort of design for anything from a simple logo to a full website, I would recommend you to him.

Last but not least, here are images of the front and back of my t-shirt. I hope you think it’s great and will want to get one and help the cause. If you don’t like it, let me know. If you do like it (and I’m thinking you probably will), let everyone know!

As I write this, I don’t have much time to fully comment on the experiences that I had at this year’s World Team Trials. The trials this year took place May 30-31 in Council Bluffs, IA. The summation of it all is this: I came, I wrestled, I got my hand raised last. Included in this post is my post championship match interview. It’s pretty cool and it’s on youtube if you’d like to check it out directly at
96 kg GR World Team Trials champion R.C. Johnson (Sunkist Kids)

Hopefully I’ll be able to finish this post soon and try to give a more complete accounting of the days events…

In my all to familiar effort to catch this thing up do date I thought I’d say a thing or two about the time between Nationals and World Team Trials. That puts these things between mid April and the end of May. During this time not much happened and a lot happened all at once.

Later in April, the 24th to be exact, a good buddy of mine had his PhD defense and I tell you what, this guy is good. I’ve always respected the work he does and am glad to know the kid. I think it was a good for me to have witnessed the defense, because when it’s my turn I’ll already have some sort of idea of the process (at least for the defense itself). Long story short, you write a book, give a lecture on your new stuff and then get peppered with questions from your committee members and the peanut gallery. Fun, fun, fun.

After that, there were good times and not so good times, lots of work on and off the mat in prep for trials, and other different events. One of the more interesting events involved the filing of a patent; the details of which are only really interesting to a few people at this point, but hopefully many more down the line. It was an interesting experience to file my first patent. The process is interesting in that you do all your research, pay a good lawyer to help you file, file, and then sit and wait (up to a couple years!) for someone to review it and finally start the dialogue (there’s apparently lots of back and forth communication involved once the process starts) for weather or not you can get it granted. It was entertaining and hopefully it won’t be the last one I work on.

Other than these two events, the time in between the two tournaments was spent finishing up my last semester of classes (ever, I do believe!) and working on improving myself as a wrestler. Something funny about that last part (improving myself) is that while I don’t like to comment about policies that have been implemented at certain places that I frequent, I feel it is necessary to say that removing key pieces of direct support does not improve a situation in which that support is crucial (speaking of past and present times) it only destabilizes it. But hey, champions persevere… right?

So there you have it, not much, and yet quite a bit, occurred in the time between Nationals and Trials.

Good times.