Hungry And Blowin' In The Wind

Sets 165-166 (of 365):

Stuart vs. D. at Northwest Park. Winner: D. 7-6(6), 6-4.

My Mojo: Scattered And Obtuse

Two bad signs started off this match. The first was that I has scheduled this match a half an hour after I got off work and barely had time to get there, but as soon as I got off work, I was ravenously hungry, but didn't have time to stop somewhere to get something to eat. So I was already bothered by the fact that I hadn't eaten since the morning, and was very low on energy. Between sets, I found a fiber bar in my backpack, and chowed it down, but what I needed was serious carbs for glycogen to my nuscles, and I didn't have that.

The other bad sign was that the wind was blowing really hard, and my hair was falling in my face, despite the fact that I had pulled it back into a ponytail. I searched for a headband on almost every changeover, hoping that I had packed one, but (crap) I hadn't. So my hair kept flying in my eyes. So from now on, I'll have a headband in my tennis backpack, no matter what.

This was a long and grueling match, and hard for me to play without fuel in my body. I was almost doomed from the start by that, and my opponent was playing really well. He was getting to shots that I never thought he would get to. And both of us were running all over the place. I was not handling this too bad, but I definitely felt the drop in percentage of effectiveness from the lack of nutrition. And my hair flying into my face was putting me in a really foul mood. Not to mention that I was also a little distracted by a couple of attractive females who were playing a few courts over.

But I don't mean to use any of this as an excuse. I just didn't bring what was needed to the courts on this day. The matches were hair-splittingly close most of the time, and I failed to convert advantages over and over again when I had them. In the first set's tiebreak, I was up 6-1 and lost all the subsequent points to lose 8-6. If that isn't a bad omen, I don't know what is. In the second set, I was ahead 2-0, then he caught up to 2-2. Then I was ahead 4-2 and he won all the rest of the games. So I just was not able to bring it in. My serve was adequate, but not great. My groundstrokes got the ball over, but did not place well strategically a good portion of the time. We had many games where there were really long rallies, and the match took almost two and a half hours to complete.

At the beginning of the second set, though, the clouds seemed to break for me, as my game came back to pre-injury levels for the first two games. That was a good sign because it was the first time since early March that I had played in a fashion where things were working well and flowing smoothly, even if just for two games. So it is coming back, as memory slowly comes back in fits and spurts to an amnesiac.

On the last point, I screamed out "FUCK!" as my intended shot went askew, and then immediately sheepishly apologized for the outburst. I had been cussing myself under my breath before that, and had been in a dark mood throughout the match. I remember when I started this series, thinking to myself that I wouldn't let this stuff affect me, and that I would just see it as a pleasant workout. Lately I've been getting too inside it, and I need to back off and figure out ways to be calmer in the face of adversity, and get back to just working on hitting the ball the best I can for every shot instead of wrestling with invisible demons.

I was planning to going to the group lesson at Pharr, but the match went longer than I expected, so I would have gotten there significantly late. And I was exhausted and out of fuel anyway. So I blew that off and went home to rest.