"You hate it while you’re doing it, but you love the feeling afterwards," junior Sam DeBey said. "It’s like getting a knife stabbed into your chest. Once you take it out and stitch it up, put some ice on it, it feels hella good."

DeBey, who wrestles on the junior varsity wrestling team, refers to the training required for wrestling. After trying it myself, I feel it’s an apt comparison.

A wrestler must attain a compromise between strength and weight, so if you take wrestling seriously, as the Paly wrestling team does, you must condition yourself to an extent that changes your lifestyle heavily.

Weight is a critical concern for a wrestler, because if he can lose enough weight to fall into the next lower weight-class, he will have easier opponents. "It’s a balance," Jack Moses, assistant coach, said. "You want to lose weight but maintain your strength."

In attempts to lose weight, wrestlers have taken approaches that range from "boom-and-bust" eating habits to the unhealthy use of drugs. "I didn’t want to wrestle up a class," junior Gabe Alloy said, "so I would run all day and then sit in my hot tub when I couldn’t run any more." Alloy currently weighs 125 pounds, and he is wondering whether he should bulk up and wrestle in the under-130 class or cut weight for the under-119.

Unfortunately, a specific weight can be difficult to maintain, especially if one achieved it by drastic measures. Consequently, a wrestler may not weigh the desired weight when it counts, on the day of a tournament, for example. "At a typical tournament, they’ll weigh in between 7:00 and 8:00 in the morning," coach Moses said, "and wrestling starts between 9:30 and 10:30, so they have some time to eat back some of the weight they lost preparing for the scale."

"Last year I was at a tournament, and I was weighing 125 pounds," senior Fernando Shahpouri, said, "but I was .3 pounds over, so I had to take it all off — boxers and everything. Some guys cover up their packages, but not me." Apparently wrestling requires more guts than one might expect.

"Some people use saunas to dehydrate themselves," coach Moses said, "or they’ll wear plastic sweat-suits to lose water weight. We don’t encourage that here though."

But weight isn’t even half the battle. The technical skills to master in wrestling are vast and difficult. There is an array of techniques and moves that apply to any situation that might arise in a match. "There is a counter to every move," Shahpouri said.

To appreciate the tactics involved, it is important to understand how the sport works. There are three two-minute periods in a match. You start in neutral position, standing and facing your opponent. The object is to either pin your opponent on his back or to win by achieving more points than him.

"In between neutral position and a pin, a lot of things happen," said Tony Brewer, assistant coach. "You get two points for a takedown, one point for escaping it, and two points for reversing it…From that point on, the object is to turn the guy over on his back. You get two points if you get him on his back for a second and three if you get him past 45 degrees to the ground for at least five seconds."

Clearly there is more to wrestling than just a vague, sweaty dogpile. To resolve my own confusion, I chose to try it myself and see what the deal was. So I showed up to wrestling practice early and borrowed a pair of wrestling shoes from the communal bucket stored in the girls’ gym.

Practice started with coach Brewer raising his voice at a few guys who claimed they needed to skip practice to "study for finals." Then we started with some jogging, with interspersed partner drilling. It was then that I realized how exhausting it is to statically fight another person’s strength. In my mind, wrestling had been easy because I only associated exhaustion with speed, as in soccer or basketball. To have imagined it more accurately, I should have pictured wrestling against myself: someone with exactly my weight, as is truly the case. Then I would have realized that it couldn’t be easy for both of us.

Soon I began to take water breaks at a frequency that would have gotten me kicked off the team had I not had journalistic privileges. By the time David Duran, the head coach, called the real water break, I had already quit. Before the wrestlers left the room for water, he mentioned, "after the break, we’ll do some conditioning." Conditioning? What have I been doing for the past hour?