In swimming, maybe you don’t sweat cuz you’re already wet. I honestly ponder this.

When running, you sweat on yourself unless you rub arms with a fellow competitor or you hug your mom at the end. Generally, in basketball, soccer, baseball and the rest of sports, sweat is something you keep to yourself.

And then there’s hockey and football, where you share your sweat with layers upon layers of clothes.

But then there’s wrestling. You are sweating on someone else because you are laying on them, touching them and grabbing them. (Yes, we’re still talking about wrestling.)

And that’s what I want to focus on — wrestling, because the Cyclone wrestling team takes to the mat this weekend.

Iowa State has an Olympic-quality coach and the top recruiting class in the nation. There is no question whether this program deserves respect. (The question is whether my column today deserves any.)

Wrestling is more than grabbing another person.

Until high school, I thought wrestling was gross, probably because the hormones that make people enjoy wrestling had yet to be activated. I didn’t think much about the guys in red, leotard-type outfits. I didn’t know how tough wrestlers are.

It was high school cheerleading (Fire up!) that taught me that wrestling is much more than muscles fighting muscles on a mat.

During my junior year, my eyes were opened to the long hours and hard work these mat men (and, for our team, woman) put into their sport. After cheering only a few meets and making a few observations, color me impressed. I learned that wrestling was about dedication, strength, skill and being your own metabolic master.

The practices and competitions were (and are) long. The guys and the girl would work out from 3-7 p.m., and sometimes in the morning. For meets, we left our high school Saturday at 7 a.m., only to return from some stuffy gymnasium twelve hours later completely exhausted.

I was dead from sitting on the side yelling “Take down, take two” and pounding my paws on the mat. Me, the cheerleader who sits all day watching wrestlers wrestle their hearts out, tired. What a joke.

It’s the people who walked off the mat wearing the sweat of their opponent who had the right to be damn tired. They were the ones who spent five minutes carefully placing their hands in strategic places on their opponent’s body while attempting to use their weight (=mg) more efficiently that the other person.

It’s physically draining to use every ounce of energy to score points. And it’s emotionally draining to lose to someone who used their strength and skill to defeat yours. To all this, I say, “Whoa.”

More impressive than the intense time on the mat is the time the sport consumes off the mat. This deserves a double “Whoa.”

Off the mat, I watched them revolve their entire life around the sport. Even at the high school, they had to. The wrestlers spent hours practicing, lifting and running to sweat off excess pounds. They ate almost every meal with their weight in mind. In high school, at age seventeen, I had no concept of monitoring my eating habits. A skinny cheerleader, I was too busy gorging myself with M&M’s.

Thus, it is because of cheerleading that I am truly able to admire the wrestlers who sweat on each other for their dedication to their sport. Cyclone wrestling, this one’s for you.

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Amanda Fier is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Davenport.