Almost Dead At The End

Sets 334-336:

Stuart v. K. at The Quarries. Winner: K. 6-4, 5-7, 7-5.

My Mojo: Up, Down, Up, Down, Up, Dead.

This was a really tough match and playing it took a lot out of me. It didn't help that I had woken up the night before at two in the morning and could not get back to sleep, so I was pretty sleep-deprived by the time I played.

My opponent was not a really hard server, and he was a lefty. He was not a terribly hard hitter, but the weird spin was bedeviling me, and he was also pretty consistent. I found that when I became unfocused, my errors became my own worst enemies.

I played very well for the first three games and won them so I was up 3-0. I was playing aggressively and not making a lot of errors. Then my focus drifted away and I started losing games, mostly through my own errors. Before I knew it, I had lost the first set. This unfocused play continued through the second set, in which I was down 5-2. Then I suddenly got really focused again, and also felt very calm and cool. I came back to win the next five games, incredibly enough, to win the set 7-5.

In the third set I started off playing well and got up by 3-1. Then my focus started slowly unraveling as he picked up games. He tied up the score at 3-3, and then won the next game so he was up 4-3. I managed to get one last gasp of steam to bring me some decent play to tie the score up at 5-5. Then my mental state really unravelled as exhaustion set in. We had been playing really hard for about three hours. I started experiencing the kind of frustration that accompanied a complete draining of my energy. My errors were just killing me at this point and most of the points that I lost were due to errors. Also,many of the points became long "safe" rallies that I didn't have the upper hand on at this point because of my deteriorating attitude. I let out long primal screams of agony a couple of times as my weariness led me to too many errors, and in the end, I just could not get enough energy together to stay on top of it as I lost the last two games.

After the match, I went and sat in the shade for about five minutes to regain my strength and dissipate the heat that was taking over my body. I then went home and took a long nap, replenishing my body with the sleep that it had been deprived of.