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Wrestling and Body Utilitarianism

What Wrestling Taught an Olympic Gold Medalist About God - Christianity Today

For a good chunk of my life, I have wrestled. It is a beautiful sport in a vacuum, but there is an ugly side when it comes to weight classes. In wrestling, there is a very common practice known as cutting, which is basically losing weight within a certain amount of time. Oftentimes, this is a short term cut within a few days in which one has to think about the physical weight of the foods and drinks as well as things like water retention and fiber. I had played other sports when I was younger, but when I got to high school I didn’t quite understand just how much wrestling would be omnipresent in my bodily life, specifically surrounding food. With something like tennis, my diet would simply be whatever my mom made, or what we ordered when we went out. Once I had to start watching my weight to make sure I was in the right weight class for the team, my diet started to shift. Especially when we would be close to matches, and I would stress the whole (fully dehydrated) 24 hours before weigh ins. Immediately after weigh ins, I would go rehydrate and fuel up with foods like Cheerios and honey to give me quick energy. Even with all of these things in mind, we still had to go out and wrestle right after this starvation. We were expected to perform at our best after depriving ourselves of nutrients to make an arbitrary weight. I think it is interesting that this extremely physical sport inadvertently turns the body into something that is purely focused on one thing.

My Father’s Sacrifice

Not even a day before this unit, My father had very bad arthritis in his hands. It was very painful watching him in pain as his hands were spasming and in pain. It is a very direct reminder that my old man is actually getting older. He works at Food Depot in Baltimore, and he has worked there for 5 years. Over time, he has accumulated lesions on his skin (I think its called “psoriasis”) that were caused by him grinding his life away in a freezer. Also, one night he cut his finger very badly and went to the hospital, but still pulled through and bought me a game for Christmas. Despite his faults, he has always pulled through for my sister and I, and worked hard so that I wont have to work as hard. While he worked in a freezer all day, Ill be freezing in an office writing code on a computer. He always told me to be better than him, but I am deathly afraid that he wont be around to see that. Its very interesting to talk about what we do to have just a simple, dignified life. Parents have to destroy themselves just to provide the bare minimum for their kids.

His hands look like this so that my hands can look like this
His hands look like this so that my hands can look like this