The High Bar

Athletics at Ako (Aloisiuskolleg) didn't consist only of soccer...

There was an occasional basketball game... Back in the 1960s it was hilarious to watch German kids try and dribble... I don't know if they've gotten better in the intervening years, but that whole "you're not allowed to touch the ball in soccer" thing definitely screwed with their hand-eye coordination... I was by far the best player in my grade - and I sucked at it :-)

Then there was indoor soccer - that was insane - there was no concept of offsides or out of bounds - you did bounce passes off the walls and ceiling... The indoor soccer building collapsed during a snowstorm in early 1966 - nobody was in it at the time and I don't think they ever rebuilt it...

OK - while I was writing about soccer at Ako I forgot to mention the F-104 Starfighters. (Trust me - there's a connection.) I'm referring to the fighter planes... F-104s were incapable of going slow. Anything below 200 MPH and they fell out of the sky... The USAF didn't buy many (something about 'fatalities') but the Luftwaffe loved them...
Now - Ako was on top of a hill next to a valley and those nutbag jet jocks would occasionally fly their F-104s right past the soccer fields at eye level (100 feet off the valley floor) going about 500 MPH (That's a guesstimate, of course - but it was so fast that if you blinked you'd miss them). There was almost no warning and the ground shook after they passed - unbelievably loud... And no matter how often it happened it still scared the crap out of you... But I digress...

There wasn't much emphasis on track and field events at Ako... I only have one memory of the 50 meter dash and it's not about me. I was watching the other kids run... And one of them suddenly veered off the track - tripped over a bush - and fell on his face... His explanation: "I wanted to see if I could run faster with my eyes closed..." Yeah ... apparently not :-)

The other major sport at Ako (after soccer) was gymnastics. During P.E. (regular school hours) we were coached in floor exercise, vault, parallel bars and high bar. For most students those P.E. classes provided more than enough gymnastics - but after the 65/66 Christmas break I took an interest in it and started spending a lot of my afternoons in the gym.

I was hopeless at floor exercises - I didn't even try to improve...
The parallel bars were OK - except for my "pain avoidance" issue... It was incredibly easy to lose your grip - and that usually resulted in parts of your anatomy (some very sensitive) slamming into the bars - classic "funniest videos" stuff...
I was also OK at vaulting - but I could not stick the landing on any routine that involved flips so I had to restrict myself to the more basic elements.

Then there was the high bar... I'm not sure why I got so obsessive/compulsive about it. It just felt indescribably amazing when you "got it right"...
It didn't come easy to me - it took weeks to master the basic "kip mount"... I spent countless hours on the bar until I could do almost all of the simple elements and quite a few of the intermediate ones (there were diagrams on the gym wall).
BTW - You'd think that the high bar would require a lot of arm strength - actually, abdominal strength is much more important - and by the time we left Germany I had "abs of steel"... Now I have "abs of flab"... Getting old sucks :-)
One day I was working on my high bar dismount and got frustrated because I wasn't always getting the desired height and distance. So - I grabbed a vaulting horse and positioned it so I'd land on it if my dismount was short... A few of the guys in the gym noticed what I was up to and started screaming "Are you freaking crazy?? You're going to kill yourself!!!" I ignored them - and nailed the dismount 10 times in a row. There's nothing like a little extra incentive :-)

It should come as no surprise that Germany had a national athletics program with annual evaluation and awards... And my high bar scores were in the top 5% of my age group nationwide. I was given a 'Siegerurkunde' for that but I haven't seen it since we left Germany...

You know - it's probably time for me to move beyond all this self-indulgent crap about my erstwhile athletic prowess. Sigh... - back then I used athletics to escape the chaos and anxiety... And now I'm using writing about athletics to escape writing about all the chaos and anxiety... Some things never change :-)