damon's blog

Last night I had my first outdoor fight for years. Though I have quite a lot of fights under my belt, I almost didn't get the chance to have an outdoor fight. The last one was probably about ten years ago. Don't even remember how did we get to the idea, but this guy I was talking to on GR suggested it. Well, more or less, I encouraged him to have a fight and he suggested we meet in the park. The original plan was to meet on Monday morning in Hasenheide which is quite a big park with lots of hidden corners. The fact that its a sunny week, also helped. We decided for sports and sneakers and fixed the hour and meeting point for the challenge.
Somehow last night (Saturday) I felt bored and decided to contact the guy, asking him if he wants to move it to the night before (Sunday). The idea seemed to be appealing to him and he even suggested to meet now. One o'clock at night, meeting a guy I never saw before in the park for a fight with no real set rules? You can imagine my pulse went sky high, It can be very good or very bad, but probably not just OK. I thought about it one minute more and agreed, lets have a fight now, meet you in twenty minutes at the entrance to the park. I had in mind that the guy is not very experienced and not much bigger than me.
Got in to the car and drove to the place, keeping in mind that I might find myself alone in the middle of the night, as it can happen that he just won't show up. But he did, he was already waiting for me at the entrance, with his gym clothes and all.
We met, shook hands and went inside. The park was totally dark and quite with some fog lying already on the ground, perfect atmosphere to have a fight. We went a bit inside and off road, space was definitely not a problem. It's a new feeling after you get use to your 2x2m mats, to have all that space to role around. We left our things near the three, stretched a bit but really for a short time and went at each other. As I expected the guy didn't have much of technic, however he was my height and though also slim, he has quite a rigid body, as he practice sports quite often. I managed to take him down quite fast with a leg scissors, but after a few rounds he started to ware me out. We rolled around about one hour of back and forth submission wrestling with some nasty tricks, like shoving the other guy's head into the grass and it was lots of fun. After one hour we decided to call it a day and headed back to the car. Damm I need to work on my stamina.
My first wrestling experience was at the park, many years ago and it was totally different. This was really an excellent one. So good, that I've asked myself, how come I didn't do it before? Well, definitely going to try that one again. Seems like that wasn't my last fight in that park :-) Hopefully also not the last match with this guy.