Wrestling: What a wrestling workout feels like

"Am I a masochist or just plain dumb?”

That’s the question I asked myself while walking through the basement of Jadwin Gymnasium at 9 a.m. on the Wednesday of midterm week. I was about to attempt what would undoubtedly be the most physically demanding activity I’d undertaken during my time at Princeton: try to complete one of the wrestling team’s workouts.

Accompanying me was senior captain Mike Alvarez, who had set up this meeting. As we walked toward the gym, we passed a winded member of the team stumbling up the stairs toward the locker room.

“How was the workout?” Alvarez asked.

“It sucked,” his teammate responded.

I became tenser. Things were not looking good.

I didn’t feel any better once I entered the gym, where I was greeted by one of the more ridiculous workout scenes I could have imagined. Lying on the floor were giant tires, sledgehammers, tug-of-war ropes and medicine balls. These objects were being flipped, bounced and slammed in every imaginable way, with a coach tallying the results of each wrestler.

As I soon realized, the actual workout consisted of a series of 15 consecutive exercise stations. Each station lasted 45 seconds, with a 15-second break before the next station. In effect, the workout was a 15-minute gut check to see how far you were willing to push yourself. Or in my case, how far I was capable of pushing myself.

Head coach Chris Ayres had assigned himself to lead me through the circuit. Ayres seemed excited by my presence. “You’re crazy,” he commented, smiling.

Before beginning the workout, I asked Ayres if he had a name for this workout. “Hell,” Ayres deadpanned, adding, “We call this ‘The Medieval,’ because things just get crazy.” I was about to find out how crazy they could get.

The first station was tire flips. Might sound easy, but the tire in question would have looked big at a monster truck rally. After flipping the tire over, I was supposed to jump in and out of it and then flip it back to its original side. The only way for me to flip the tire was wrest it up onto my knee, get my entire weight beneath the enormous hunk of black rubber and then slowly push it over to the other side.

After watching Alvarez pull off nine repetitions of this exercise, I somehow managed to flip the tire five times. Ayres seemed impressed by my effort.

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Next was the Aerodyne bike station, where I had to keep the rate of my pedaling above 70 revolutions per minute for the 45-second period. After the tire flips, biking was a welcome respite, and I powered through the exercise. “Great job,” Ayres said.

Right off the bike, I ran to the sledgehammer station, where I hit a tire as many times as possible in the allotted time span. If nothing else, banging a tire with a sledgehammer for 45 seconds gave me a newfound respect for anyone who helped lay the Transcontinental r]Railroad: After hammering the tire 17 times, my arms were starting to feel like rubber.

The 15-second break evaporated into thin air. Right away, I was slamming a 10-pound medicine ball on the ground as hard as I could. As with most of the exercises, this activity was made noticeably easier by using my hips and core as sources of added strength. Unfortunately, my hips were not exactly cooperating with me, and I ended up overusing my weaker arm muscles.

I banged out 23 medicine ball slams, then immediately went to the next station. Here, I rotated a barbell with 35 pounds of weight that was attached to the wall, from one hip to the other, each time passing the weight over my head in the process. Needless to say, this exercise did not make my arms any less tired.

If I was looking for a break, I wasn’t about to get it.

I used my entire 15-second break running across the gym to the battle ropes. This station basically entailed creating wave patterns with two tug-of-war-length ropes for 45 seconds. After what seemed like a minute of rope swinging, I looked at the clock. To my dismay, I still had 20 seconds left before I could let go of the ropes. After struggling through the end of the battle ropes workout, it was on to the rowing machine.

Thankfully, I could draw on some past experience using a rowing machine and knew how to best complete this exercise while minimizing the strain on my arms. For the first time, I felt like I was doing something correctly. Ayres sounded impressed. “Really good,” he said. “This is awesome.” I jumped off the rowing machine excited by Ayres’ approval.

I carried my momentum to the next exercise: standing lunges, another motion with which I was familiar. Ayres continued to be impressed as I completed 19 lunges with a 45-pound weight above my head. “You’re doing great,” he said.

Yet just when things were looking up, the reality of my athletic limitations came back to smack me in the face.

The next station was a second round of the tire flips. As I tried to hoist the tire up, I could not get it to the halfway point, at which a simple push would let gravity do the rest of the work. In the middle of my attempt, my sneaker slipped off my left foot, and the tire came crashing to the ground. “Be careful,” Ayres said, looking concerned.

I tried lifting the tire once more, only for my shoe to fall off a second time, and the tire again to come crashing to the ground with a loud thud. Not wanting to have an injured reporter on his hands, Ayres smartly suggested I just jump in and out of the tire for the remainder of the station. This small respite, while increasing my personal safety, did not make me any less tired.

Now 60 percent of my way through the workout, I began to enter what can only be described as an exercise-induced stupor. For the next five minutes, I stumbled my way through station after station, each making me more tired than the previous one.

As if flipping tires wasn’t enough, I then had to stand up from a sit-up position with a 45-pound weight over my head. One caveat: The weight couldn’t touch the ground. After willing my way to a standing position three times, it was back to the sledgehammer. I struggled mightily to lift the sledgehammer over my head, each time weakly slamming it on the tire.

Next was a second round of the Aerodyne bike, then throwing a medicine ball against a wall, followed by another round of medicine ball slams. With only one more exercise to go, I could barely stand up straight.

The final exercise was a standing row with 70 pounds of weight attached to a barbell. “If the weight is too much, we can make it a little lighter,” Ayres said. Not thinking twice, I gladly accepted his offer, and Ayres took off a 25-pound weight, lowering the amount I had to lift to 45 pounds. With my absolute last available burst of energy, I managed to complete 31 rows before the final bell sounded.

“You made it,” Ayres said, moving to shake my hand. I could barely lift my arm, let alone say anything, in response.

But Ayres remained positive. “You’re a tough kid, man. Seriously, that’s not easy. A lot of kids would have quit.”

As I left the gym, I thought to myself, “And this is the wrestling team’s workout during midterms week.” I shuddered to think what Coach Ayres had in store for his team after Fall Break.

Satisfied after completing the workout, I went for a quasi-celebratory breakfast with Alvarez and sophomore Dan Kolodzik. Over a hefty meal, Alvarez told me that the best part about Wednesday morning workouts was the post-breakfast naps. “It’s the best nap you’ll ever have,” he explained.

Knowing that I had a good deal of reading to do before an afternoon seminar, I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to partake in this part of the workout experience. Yet as I began to read, I quickly became tired. After a 20-minute battle to accomplish something, I threw in the towel, promptly passing out in the commodious brown leather chair where I’d been reading.

When I awoke an hour later, I could barely move my forearms to turn off my watch alarm. Yet somehow, I still felt great.