Wrestling? I wrote the book.
Tonight, after six years away, I returned to my old wrestling club. Having fond memories of my time at Slough Freestyle Wrestling Club, I was amazed and overjoyed to find the same coach there, who was just as welcoming as he had always been. His son, who was hip-high last time I saw him, is now ranked number two in England for juniors of his weight and taught me more in fifteen minutes than I could remember from my years on the mats!
You see, when it comes to wrestling, I wrote the book. Or rather, I wrote the syllabus…with my mum. Interested? Confused? Sickened? Read on…
After completing my GCSEs at school, I decided I’d had enough and wanted to leave. Having no real direction or alternative, however, (and having decided the Marines wasn’t for me) I agreed to continue into the sixth form only if I could study subjects I had never studied before.
So, I signed up for Philosophy, Psychology, Ancient History (which my school changed to Biology)…and PE. Yes, A-Level PE. Cue laugh… Great, nice one – do you know anything involved in A-Level PE? No? I didn’t think so.
Part history, part psychology and part biology, only a small element of A-Level PE actually involves doing physical sport. Even so, without taking part in two accredited sports, you can’t complete the AS-Level, let alone the A-Level. My two sports were rugby and wrestling. Unfortunately, wrestling wasn’t an accredited sport; there was no syllabus for wrestling and nobody to mark wrestlers or judge their wrestling ability.
It seemed I had two options: take up another sport or drop PE and take a subject I’d done at GCSE. Neither sat well with me; the only reason I’d stayed on at school was to study something new and I certainly didn’t want to have to learn another sport. More to the point, I didn’t have TIME to take up another sport!
My training: 2003-2005
Monday: Sleeping
Tuesday: Professional Wrestling
Wednesday: Olympic Wrestling
Thursday: Rugby
Friday: Drinking
Saturday: Rugby and Olympic Wrestling
Sunday: Rowing
Luckily, my mum is something of a legend. She suggested a third option; we write the A-Level syllabus for wrestling, get it approved by the examination body and I take my own version of A-Level PE. To most people, this would sound ridiculously far-fetched. To me – somebody barely based in reality – this sounded ideal.
So, that’s what we did. I won’t get into the details but, via a combination of my teenage stubbornness and my mum’s relentless determination and persuasive techniques that would have MI5 scribbling revision notes, we got Olympic Wrestling approved as a sport for A-Level PE. On the plus side, I could keep up the sport I loved. On the other hand, when everybody else was comparing notes of the physiology of a rugby tackle, I had to create every piece of coursework from scratch – every little established rule or marking scheme had to be adapted and changed, just for me. I should take this opportunity to thank my PE teachers once again for their support.
Sadly, when I left High Wycombe to go to the University of Leeds (where I studied Philosophy, just so you know), I stopped wrestling. Tonight, I returned…and by the Gods it was just as hard as I remembered!
I’ve never encountered a sport as hard as wrestling. No doubt I’ll write more about this in coming weeks but, simply put, fighting another man of equal size and weight (or 10kg heavier, as it happened tonight) is just about the toughest thing you can do. Wrestling exhausts muscles that most sports don’t even require and, once those muscles are numb, it finds other muscles to take over. Once all your muscles are numb…well, you just get thrown around until the round is up. There is nothing – nothing – harder than wrestling. Not that I’ve found, anyway.
I’m looking forward to next week already. Hopefully my mat burns will have healed by then! Again, apologies for no video – I’m being very careful about making sure these clubs understand my training is genuine, not just a gimmick for a quite video clip.
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