The Highs and Lows
It has been an amazing four weeks since my last post. I have had many highs and few really lows. The ups and downs bring up new questions for me, and the main one is what is it that I am looking to achieve while enjoy tennis as a fun hobby. It is a competitive sport at the end, and without movement forward, staying stagnant is not for me. Although I keep my competitiveness in check for the most extent - otherwise it get impractical and unhealthy - I still want to be competitive on court both in singles and doubles, and continue to improve. Let me get back to this later on.For the highs: I was invited into my club's 4.0+ singles group to play regularly for practice matches, my serves have gotten very good with nearly excellent placement and pace, my volleys are improving, my movement on court has also improved noticeably specifically in singles matches, I am cutting down on my unforced errors and playing matches more intelligently with strategy. All of this makes me enjoy tennis even more, pushing me to play even more, win or lose.
For the lows: I am losing matches more often than I win, primarily because I don't get onto the court to win, but just to play. My game is not yet consistent and too dependent on my physical condition any given day. I stopped losing weight, which means the level of activity I am performing is not going to get me to the next level. At the same time, my body is now objecting the number of matches I am playing each week, and it is telling me to slow down and I am doing too much for my age, health and weight.
The experiences of each match are giving me new perspectives to analyze and understand about my game and my personality. I loved tennis since I started playing it at nine. It is very unfortunate I quit it, I did myself a big disservice. Now that I started back with tennis, I feel rejuvenated and passionate. I coming to conclusion that tennis will be part of me the rest of my life, health permitting. The key to enjoying tennis for the long term is without a doubt health.
It is such a terrible and helpless feeling to be sidelined with injury, or having to play at a diminished capacity because your arm, elbow or shoulder is too sore, or having to endure cramps during matches; even the feel of the extra weight you gained over the last few decades is demoralizing. Imagine feeling breathless mid-match and you cannot any longer run to the balls just 5-6 ft away from you, cannot hit your most basic shot.
I am lucky; besides knee and foot injuries I experienced during the first weeks of returning to tennis, I have been injury free and have been losing weight since then, so all is in a positive direction. When I first started back nine months ago, I could only play about once a week. I had sore muscles, knee and foot issues, elbow was hurting, and my heart and lungs just could not keep up. Today it is quite different; I slowly increased frequency of my play to two/wk, then three and now to four. This has had tremendously positive impact on my game; I can stay on court two hours and play at moderate intensity in singles, ligaments around my knees and ankles have strengthened, elbow has no complaints, and my cardio improved more than ten times. I still have sore muscles all the time after any play, but that is normal at my age I think. This is not getting better, and actually somewhat worse. It is one of those types of pains that makes you feel alive and proud frankly, so couple of Advils and back to play.
However, this week has been a little different: Generally it takes me 18-24 hours to recover from an intense singles match or clinic, so I try to make sure I don't schedule anything too intense on back-to-back days and give a chance to my body to recover, this has been working well. This week, although I thought I gave enough time to my body to recover, during matches I felt sick, had lack of energy and soreness coming much earlier than before. My game suffers quite immediately when my body does not cooperate, and that is just not fun. One of the first rules in tennis is to listen to our bodies and not to push it over the edge, hopefully avoiding long-term or permanent injuries. Now I need to figure out how long I need to rest before I get back to my form from a week ago, this time it feels different and I may need more time than usual to even avoid a repeat of the situation.
As my physical performance deteriorates when I am over-doing activities, it has become clear that not only I need to supplement my activities with physical conditioning, but also my playing techniques are not as established as I thought they were. In turn this has exposed the weaknesses in my game that my opponents find it easier to exploit. Losing matches in a manner that would suggest I am not even close to being competitive at my level, and amplifying my weaknesses has given me a better idea on what I need to work on if I want to become a solid NTRP 4.0 player.
You may wonder why I am not targeting to becoming a 4.5 or a 5.0 player, why just 4.0? The answer is simpler than I thought it was: Physical stamina and performance. As I have had the chance to play with 4.0 and 4.5 level players during the last 4-5 weeks, it is very clear to me that I cannot reverse all of the negatives of staying inactive for the past thirty years, and I do not believe I can bring up my physical performance to compete against even mediocre 4.5 level players, let alone 5.0 players. Getting to 4.0 level is not going to be easy either, both physically and technically, but that is a challenge I am taking, and will have fun doing so, while keeping myself injury free as much as possible. Pushing myself beyond this level at this time seems to increase risk to my well-being exponentially, and I am not yet ready to commit to that; maybe sometime in the future I'll reconsider, but right now I would like to be in the 4.0 group within the 2017 season.
It is such a terrible and helpless feeling to be sidelined with injury, or having to play at a diminished capacity because your arm, elbow or shoulder is too sore, or having to endure cramps during matches; even the feel of the extra weight you gained over the last few decades is demoralizing. Imagine feeling breathless mid-match and you cannot any longer run to the balls just 5-6 ft away from you, cannot hit your most basic shot.
I am lucky; besides knee and foot injuries I experienced during the first weeks of returning to tennis, I have been injury free and have been losing weight since then, so all is in a positive direction. When I first started back nine months ago, I could only play about once a week. I had sore muscles, knee and foot issues, elbow was hurting, and my heart and lungs just could not keep up. Today it is quite different; I slowly increased frequency of my play to two/wk, then three and now to four. This has had tremendously positive impact on my game; I can stay on court two hours and play at moderate intensity in singles, ligaments around my knees and ankles have strengthened, elbow has no complaints, and my cardio improved more than ten times. I still have sore muscles all the time after any play, but that is normal at my age I think. This is not getting better, and actually somewhat worse. It is one of those types of pains that makes you feel alive and proud frankly, so couple of Advils and back to play.
However, this week has been a little different: Generally it takes me 18-24 hours to recover from an intense singles match or clinic, so I try to make sure I don't schedule anything too intense on back-to-back days and give a chance to my body to recover, this has been working well. This week, although I thought I gave enough time to my body to recover, during matches I felt sick, had lack of energy and soreness coming much earlier than before. My game suffers quite immediately when my body does not cooperate, and that is just not fun. One of the first rules in tennis is to listen to our bodies and not to push it over the edge, hopefully avoiding long-term or permanent injuries. Now I need to figure out how long I need to rest before I get back to my form from a week ago, this time it feels different and I may need more time than usual to even avoid a repeat of the situation.
As my physical performance deteriorates when I am over-doing activities, it has become clear that not only I need to supplement my activities with physical conditioning, but also my playing techniques are not as established as I thought they were. In turn this has exposed the weaknesses in my game that my opponents find it easier to exploit. Losing matches in a manner that would suggest I am not even close to being competitive at my level, and amplifying my weaknesses has given me a better idea on what I need to work on if I want to become a solid NTRP 4.0 player.
You may wonder why I am not targeting to becoming a 4.5 or a 5.0 player, why just 4.0? The answer is simpler than I thought it was: Physical stamina and performance. As I have had the chance to play with 4.0 and 4.5 level players during the last 4-5 weeks, it is very clear to me that I cannot reverse all of the negatives of staying inactive for the past thirty years, and I do not believe I can bring up my physical performance to compete against even mediocre 4.5 level players, let alone 5.0 players. Getting to 4.0 level is not going to be easy either, both physically and technically, but that is a challenge I am taking, and will have fun doing so, while keeping myself injury free as much as possible. Pushing myself beyond this level at this time seems to increase risk to my well-being exponentially, and I am not yet ready to commit to that; maybe sometime in the future I'll reconsider, but right now I would like to be in the 4.0 group within the 2017 season.
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