Journey To Perfection

As the wrestling season came to an end, there was more talk of going to a wrestling camp in at Northern Illinois University that lasted for ten days. When the final registration came up there were only three of us going to the camp, Aquila, me, and Kyle. I was pretty nervous about going because I knew I wasn't that great and in the Midwest wrestling is huge. Other than that I was expecting to come back better than I'd ever thought I could be.

When I saw Aquila at the airport he told me that Kyle had gotten into trouble and cancelled the night before. It ended up being just Aquila and I going to the camp.

We arrived at the campus around noon after about two hours of driving. When we first got to the camp, we had to go into a conference room and get our room keys, free water bottles, and schedules. Next we went into our dorm rooms. The dorm rooms had to be the worst thing about the place because they were about nine feet long and five feet wide with barely enough room to walk between the beds. We had a small fridge and a tiny fan that I brought with me. There was also a desk on either side of the room.

One of the biggest surprises was that we had two sessions on the first day. I believe that we had to time how fast we could run a mile. The second was just a lecture about the rules and regulations. Each day we had three sessions. The first was running and strength training at six o'clock in the morning. The next was a technique session at one in the afternoon. The last was my favorite, free wrestling at six p.m. Free wrestling means that we just wrestle six minute matches without stopping.

There were a lot of things that I won't be able to forget. For example, one of many drills was to run up and down stadium steps twenty times. Think about it. The NIU stadium has at least one hundred steps. That's a lot of stairs. To this day I have never done anything more exhausting. I don't think that anyone forgot about that. One of the reasons that I was successful in completing that task was because the counselors