alpinisto's blog

I had successfully followed the idea of wrestling every calendar month throughout the winter, but after I in March had been wrestling every month since October this aim had been reached, I started to think: why stop here? For it seemed that wrestling not only was good for my body, but I also had had some good experiences with wrestling, so maybe the next aim should be to work for a full year of wrestling. Which should be quite easy, for I had now wrestled every month since July - and actually I could have had the full year done now, for I had wrestled every month since April last year - if it hadn't been because of the strikes in Paris which had forced me to cancel that trip in June last year.

A good help for reaching this aim had been my friendship with kleiner kerl in Berlin, for at his place I not only had a place to stay overnight, but he also had mats to wrestle on and several mates who could come by his place for a mutual wrestle, which I saw as a win-win-win situation. But in my eyes I shouldn't make too much use of his hospitality, I thought, and this May I could see that I would have severe trouble getting to wrestle at all that month, as all this traveling had put some stress on my finances. Again help arrived from a somewhat unexpected side.

A friend of mine had returned to Denmark for the summer and was getting ready to move into his summer house. And when I became invited to spend a few days there with him I saw this as a wrestling opportunity as I had wrestled him there a few times before in the past years. This guy Peter had in former years been working in London and there had attended a local wrestling club, but didn't really felt that he could fit in with the lads there. And after increasing back problems he had stopped wrestling there. Which also is the reason why he is not to be found on this site. But I could wrestle him as long as I didn't gave him too heavy bearhugs.

Yesterday morning we started wrestling, and I usually need some time to warm up - which we didn't do this time. So it didn't take long before he had me under his control in a grapewine. Maybe I should have tried to find a way out of the situation, but I generally prefer to tap instead of spending too much energy in fruitless attempts to move on - so I tapped.

The next rounds were better. In one I successfully had him headscissored with my legs and in another one I managed to do the 'schwitzkasten' hold which my Berlin friend kleiner kerl often used to defeat his opponents. But in the next round he made a counter-attack which I was not prepared for.

In order to keep the fight under control on the small size of the mattress I always start in the kneeling position, and this position has some advantage as I then hardly get any unexpected falls, but it also has disadvantages, which I soon was to learn. For when I was in the kneeling position my knees were locked in position on the mattress, so when Peter unexpectedly moved forward to bring me out of balance my body tumbled back, thus bending my knees fully. A jolt of pain sprang through my body, for my knees had not been bent like this since my youth, so this became a sudden end of our match.

After a few minutes relaxing on the mattress I could stretch out and conclude that it seemed that nothing seriously had happened, but I still had that dull pain in my right knee. It was somewhat similar to the January match I had had with Xxlbear in Berlin, with the exception that I then had been able to pull him with me so that he became the guy mostly affected by my fall. Maybe my knees had not been locked in a similar way then - and probably I should stop kneeling down before the start of a match and squat down instead. Which I also have been working on with the physio the recent month. Apparently a squat start is more safe than a kneeling start.

I will have two weeks to find out, for June will probably give me the most serious wrestling this year, for not only will I attend the international wrestling camp in Lindow in the Pentecost weekend, but also I plan to meet a guy called horti when I two weeks later am spending a week in Dresden. And this 300-pound guy will not be the heaviest guy I will encounter the next month - I better get my knees prepared before then!