Wrestling Blogs - Mike Tamillow

I hate naming my posts by topic. I know it makes it hard to categorize and remember but you’ll just have to read all of them if you want any bit of wisdom I have to offer. How do you even explain to someone why A Treatise on ‘Watchamacallit’ is an article about position? This week I mean it, I’m going to talk about hiking, I’m also going to talk about the difference between the terms ‘position’ and ‘technique’.

My high school speech teacher told me all analogies are false. That’s a pretty bold statement. Since I’m starting to really lose any moral qualms I might have had with lying, I think I’ll stick to using analogies. I think there are only two ways of understanding anything. There is the approach of experiencing it: feeling, touching, describing, hearing; and then there is the approach of comparing. This is the approach of trying to create understanding through previous understanding. With words and pictures I can do a decent job of handing off somewhat understandable information. I like to carry analogies until they no longer make sense.

On a side note: Now that I have a blog, I can write anything I want on it. Then when I get into an argument, I can source myself. That makes it impossible to prove me wrong.

After my freshman year at college I went down to the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs. I hadn’t been there before for anything but the junior world team trials that year, which I won. I actually really love it down there. A lot of the athletes think it’s boring and being fenced in is a little weird for me. It’s not a huge city so needless to say it’s more about finding your own Zen and routine than about interesting things to do. I set up a date to come to the training center right before the Freestyle/Greco camps started.

I started out by working out with the Greco guys. There are huge advantages to wrestling Greco. The Greco guys are more of a group then the freestyle guys in my experience. Since the wrestlers training for Greco only have a few clubs to train with, they seemed pretty tight. The marines are all together, then there are the guys that live at Colorado springs, and another group at the USOEC. Of course they are all competitive, but while I was there, the Greco guys did a lot more fun stuff as a group.

One of these things we did was called the Powerade challenge. The group of Greco guys and some of the women’s freestyle team drove out to the middle of the wilderness in Colorado. It was an all day event, the weather was great and I couldn’t have asked for a better landscape. It really is beautiful out there, huge cliffs, different types of trees everywhere you look, streams breaking through the forest, along rock formations, and sand and dirt trails to travel on, without the bother of daily urban life. We set up our campsite on a pond. This was where we were all supposed to start. We were paired up with a partner or two to help us find each destination. Each group was given a map and a compass. There were points on the map; the task was to find these in the wilderness. We had to pickup some marker at the point to prove we were there. The map had altitudes on it and significant landmarks. It had trails and other valuable information. I was sure this was going to be simple. This was a race. If I remember there was something like 12 or 15 points, and we had what looked to me like a huge amount of time for the goal. I was interested in winning.

I was paired up with Sam Hazewinkel and Jenny Wong. We were going to be unstoppable. I was sure of it. I used a compass only twice before, and never with much success. Every other camping trip I took I let other people navigate. I was just the muscles to carry any extra gear. But this time I we didn’t have any extra gear, and, frankly, I wanted to win. I decided to try helping out a little. The first few came easy, we just followed the other guys. Then we had to start figuring out things for ourselves. We weren’t doing all that bad, I think we figured out two. It took us a while but we got them. And then somehow we just got lost. I say somehow because I have a hard time admitting that I got us really, really lost. I just looked at the map and said “oh we’re right here, lets just keep going as fast as we can towards this point” We finally got off the map when we determined we were lost, even though we were on a trail. Someone drove by and we asked them for directions, all they could really tell us was we headed way off the wrong way. So we started walking back… I have determined if I ever do the Powerade challenge again, I am going to bring a GPS device along (It might ruin the fun though)… We came back to the campsite and were one of the bottom scoring teams. What an adventure.

This story is hopefully to let you see a little bit what hiking is like. The difference between position and technique is the difference between the forest and the path.

I’ll start out my analogy with definitions. The definition I prefer most for technique is “ a method of performance; way of accomplishing” and for position is “condition with reference to place; location; situation” (from dictionary.com ) So in the most simple sense the path is your method to get to each point, your position is your location.

In the context of the woods, if I had a path, reaching each checkpoint would be simple… Not so much. We were given a map and there were trails. Along the way we had difficulties. We were required to change our path to get to the checkpoints. The only way to really find a new path was to use our compass wisely or in a better case, become familiar with the territory. Both were options. However, using our compass required taking some time. Becoming familiar with the territory required work behind the scenes. (Brad Vering destroyed the competition that year. He had done the Powerade challenge before and already knew the fastest routes)

Teaching technique is much easier than teaching position for this reason. Teaching someone a simple route that’s already been successfully taken so many times is easy. Teaching someone how to observe where they are at and how to get to the next place is a bit harder. It requires having an understanding of physics applied to wrestling. The beauty of learning good technique is that with a little understanding of position, you can recover when you get knocked around a little. Imagine going through a trail in the woods. You lose the trail for a second but because you know how to use your compass you can get right back on anywhere along the way. However, to push my analogy further, you can also create these little trails to get back on course over time. For example, I can easily recover into a double leg from being knocked on my butt. It’s a technique I wouldn’t have trouble teaching, and with practice anyone could do.

I guess I like to toy with my analogies to, to see if they really make sense. So I would have to consider impassible areas of terrain. Rocks, lakes, whatever. These would be positions that you just can’t get through. Either you aren’t flexible enough or strong enough. There may be someone who can pass them, but for you it just isn’t going to happen. In this case you’d have to find an alternate route. Some techniques are just meant for some people more than others. It’s the beauty of wrestling, any style can work. Click here for advice from someone who is smarter than I am. . Once you understand the terrain, you can choose what path is the easiest for you to take. A good coach will help you find the path of least resistance. Another concept I could toy with in my model would be funk. Funk is the repeated use of position that no one is familiar with. It is used over and over again in an expected way until finally that position has it’s own path. What I’m saying is funk is technique. Funk is just as much technique as a double leg takedown, except it started off as a back route. Someone went out into the woods and decided to start where no one else was looking. He took his compass and made a nice path to the destination. Then, after taking this familiar route over and over again, he decided to bulldoze the trees and make it into an established route. If that person was smart he made a sign that says, “Private property do not enter!” If that person was even smarter, he charged people an entrance fee and gave them a map to use the route.

Here’s the mental model. Start out with a simple forest with a few rock formations, lakes, and terrain in it. These are all your possible positions. Have someone tell you the most likely paths and test them out to reach your destination. If they seem like they are difficult to get through then travel over and over them until they are easy to cross. These are all your most effective techniques. Now explore other possible pathways that people have found. Go over and over and over them until they become natural. These are other effective techniques you can go to when you your first path has a bear standing in the way. Create links between your pathways; make it easy to start out by taking one path, and then when you find a bear in the way, you can still switch off. These are your transitions from one effective technique to another without any hesitation. They will save your life. Every once in a while throw yourself out into the woods, get lost. Take out your compass point yourself in the right direction, find your path, and get to your destination. This is your understanding of position, as long as you know how to recover right away, you will never end up truly lost. Then find those paths that aren’t typical; the ones that no one sees around the back; that no one tells you to take. These are your funk, sometimes you can get your takedown, and sometimes you’ll go right into your five-point move. But more than likely only a few people will know about these and you’ll have to carve them out yourself. (or take them from someone who has)

And then when you match up your set of paths with your opponent’s set of paths, that’s when my analogy no longer makes sense. But since I don’t think wrestling is a struggle, the path is either there or it’s not. And position is surely an advantage defensively, that doesn’t really make sense in my model either. All in all, if my model helped you understand the difference between position, technique, and the use of funk (I actually imagined Ben Askren as a gnome under a bridge protecting the route to all that is funk in my picture) then maybe in some way or another you can use it.

Spring is coming, I can tell because it’s already 32 degrees F. warm here. I’m going to have to go hiking again this year.