Greg Louganis and I went on the show Good Morning San Diego on Thursday.  It was a lot of fun!  Carlos Amezcua was phenomenal.  His ability to control the interview and steer it in exactly the right direction was amazing!  He made me comfortable, not really nervous and I felt like he extracted the perfect combination of humor and human emotion.  Here's the segment:

http://www.kusi.com/Clip/12275895/new-book-big-fat-diver

Greg Louganis and I will be on Good Morning San Diego tomorrow morning, 3/10/2016 at 9:20.  You can stream live at KUSI.com or I'll try to get a copy of the segment after it's done.

This week has proved to be quite painful so far.  More smacks.  In fact, it's been so much and so hard that my leg looks like a cheetah.

On the plus side, I've got some new dives I'm going to try out at the competition this weekend.  I may not fare as well as I have the past three weeks because of it, but I'd rather start competing them now and increase my DD and get use to doing them.  I'll let you know how it goes.

Now off to bed as I have to get up in 5 hours to leave for San Diego.  Should be a fun trip!

The meet this weekend came with mixed results.  The diving event was sandwiched between a bunch of swim events and it was all done in a single afternoon.  As such, there was only time to compete a single board.  We could choose, which was nice, although it looks like they called it 1m, regardless of what we actually competed.

That said, I chose the 3m.  It was great because almost everyone else was on 1m.  So during warm ups I pretty much had the board to myself.

When the announcer called for the divers to warm up, I shed my shorts and t-shirt so I was just in my speedo.  As I walked towards the boards, I overheard someone comment to the person next to them, "Is he a diver?"

I just kept walking and smirked inside my head.  Oh, just you wait, I thought to myself.  I ascended the ladder to the top of the 3m.  I knew people were watching and I was actually horribly nervous.  I set the fulcrum to the appropriate spot.  Took my position towards the back of the board and did my approach.  The first jump in my warm up is always just that--a jump.  My hurdle was good, my height was good and I was ready for the second jump.  This time, it's just a back jump.  I executed that as I felt I should.  I got out of the pool and climbed the ladder for my first real dive--a back dive straight.  It's not very complex, but looks nice when done correctly.  I could FEEL the eyes on me.  The area got gradually more and more silent.  I jumped up, looked back and dove it in.  I felt like it was straight in.  Silence.  Just the sound of being underwater.  As I broke back up through the surface, I could hear people clapping.

My dives got progressively more complex and I felt like the tone had shifted from, Why is that fat, old guy in a Speedo to having the entire area cheering for me.

Once the actual competition began, it was all eyes on the individual diving--even more so than warm ups.  This was nerve-racking.  I got nervous and blew a couple of dives that I'd worked on earlier in the week and had finally been able to take them up enough to stick them in properly.  I scored low on those dives.  I was hoping at this meet I'd get to the 200 point mark.  My best had been 180 on the 3m.

I ended up scoring 166 which was disappointing.  I did take first place, so that part of course was great, but I felt disappointed in myself for not turning in my best set of dives.

I have a meet this week again.  This time it's at 8 am on Friday!  Which means I have to leave the house by about 5:15 am.  Ugh!  But there's one thing I've always said, There are two things in life getting up early for...skiing and diving.

Today was my second meet ever, my first outdoor meet, and my first away meet.  I was extremely nervous all day and until I'd made it about half-way through the first board competition.  We competed 3M first.  I dove pretty well.  I scored 5 points higher than last week, so that was awesome.  I came in first place again, so that was amazing!

3M went just as well.  My 2-1/2 was kind of lame.  And my 1-1/2 inward was weak too.  Oh yeah, so was my 1-1/2.  Overall I scored five points less than last week.  It was deserved, for sure.

The highlight of the meet was that Greg Louganis came and watched and gave me advice on what to improve after each dive.  That was great because my coach, Jose Bahena was busy judging.

All in all, it was an awesome meet at a beautiful campus on a day with incredible weather.

Saturday, 2/20/2016 I had my first dive meet ever!  It was a five college competition and was essentially all the divers in our division.  I scored almost the same amount of points on the 1-meter and the 3-meter: 175 and 176 respectively.  Here's  video recap of how it went, and the end result...

Thursday, 2/18/2016  was the second Mock Meet.  Here's how it went...

The advice Greg gave me last week was to do two scored mock meets before competition.  Monday I did the first one.  Keep in mind, I didn't dive hardly at all last week because I was having issues with my knee.  So Monday was the first day back in the pool.  I wore a knee brace and that helped squeeze everything in so it didn't feel like it was going to buckle.  Here's a video recap of the day.  Enjoy!

Happy Valentine's Day...a day filled with love and candy!

This week has been interesting to say the least.  Last week I did something to my knee.  I'm not sure what, but it feels like it could buckle when I jump on it.  So out of a possible 10 hours of on the boards diving that I had scheduled, I dove for 2 hours and 40 minutes.  So sad!!

I worked out a couple of times, and that was good, but ultimately, I'm competing on the boards, not in sit ups or push ups.  

My first competition is in six days!  I'm terrified on two levels now.  One, cause I want to do well.  But secondly, I'm terrified I won't even be able to compete if my knee doesn't get better.  The hard part about it is that I can walk about just fine.  I can do just about everything just fine and it feels okay.  But as soon as I try to put all my weight on one foot and jump off it several times in a row, that's when I run into problems.

I have practice tomorrow morning at 8 am.  I'm going to go and hope it's not a waste for Coach Jose.  He comes all the way from Anaheim to Torrance to train me and since I'm the only one on dive team, if I don't make it, then that's it.

Hopefully this week will go well.  Hopefully I can dive.  Hopefully my knee will hold up.  I include it in my prayers every night.  If you're reading this, please do the same!

Oh, and in case you're wonder, I felt love and ate candy all day.  It was awesome and terrible all at the same time.  I think it's extremely difficult to not eat tons of candy on Halloween and Valentine's Day. 

Six days to competition.  I'll keep you posted.

Friday at dive practice Greg Louganis joined us.  Friday is a little more laid back and since I'm the only person on dive team, Coach Jose jumps in with me on Fridays.  We try to one up each other.  This past Friday, Greg joined in on the fun.  Greg had recently dropped a 100+ lb. weight on his leg and it bruised it right above the knee.  So he warned us in advance he was only going to do lineups... okay, even with an injured leg it was still no contest.  Talk about the ultimate one-upper!  Good grief!  It was amazing to see him dive.  He's so great!

I went to practice today and it was back to the more serious working on the list.  It was a good day of diving for the most part.  I had one good smack where my legs hit pretty hard.  I'm not sure why it turned out this way, but they looked like candy canes.  It was red, then a white stripe in the middle--and on each leg.  That's a lot of red and white stripes going on.  It was kind of funny.

I worked on a 1-1/2 back dive pike.  I was able to go in on my head all three times.  It's still not very pretty, but I'm hoping I'll be able to clean it up this week.

I was bad on my diet this weekend.  I enjoyed dessert way more often than I should've--but on the plus side, I didn't full on binge.  I was at 179.9 today, which was awesome to get back into the 170s--albeit barely!  But this week I should be able to shed a few more pounds and get back under 175.