“Vin Diesel?” you may ask. No, a diesel car. But will come back to that later.
Firstly, my deep apologies for dropping off the face of the earth. I will justify it by being way too busy in may (I had 1 day off where I didn’t do anything).
Belgium was blessed with a 2 week summer weather trial mid May which meant that playing tennis was equally the best and the worst thing on planet earth. While I’m heavily pro sunshine etc, the air was not moving and it was 30 DEGREES CELSIUS at 7 PM IN THE EVENING. Every practice ended with me resembling someone who looked like she came straight out of the shower. The temperature spike and my touch too packed social calendar (read: concerts and meetups with friends) also lead me to getting sick which meant that breathing through nose was now a something that was no longer granted and physical performance was at 70% at best.
Heat aside, practices lately have been very meh. On one hand, certain things are really improving. On most days the feet are moving faster which means that investing in personal training with a (ex-ish) tennis-player-turned-coach is paying off. There are strength routines to keep me busy 3-4 evenings at the gym and a weekly footwork/coordination session which is such a brain gymnastic sometimes that I feel like Simone Biles but significantly less talented. Backhand is really knocking it out of the park at the moment and shot quality is great. FH slices and dropshots are improving and I start finding a right time to use them. Then there’s everything else lmao. Serve is inconsistency personified. I either hit an ace or double fault and there is no in between. Playing points results in crappy rallies, trying to win the point too fast and making mistakes I shouldn’t be doing.
Competitively speaking, our interclub season came to a relatively quick end. I did manage to win my final match in the group stage 6/4 – 6/3 (although 30 degrees at 2 PM made it the least enjoyable experience ever) but unfortunately, the following weekend that I had to skip, the team lost to the opposing team in the direct elimination round. I have to say that the whole experience was less intimidating than it first looked but our whole team was very chill in general. While a match is a match, it didn’t quite have the usual tournament ‘pressure’ behind it and I kind of treated it as a serious practice for future singles tournaments. I also signed myself up for a club championship where I got my ass kicked twice 6/4 – 6/3 in the group stage. The first match once again took seemingly ages. Despite some of the shots I made being worthy of tennisTV highlights reel, the overall performance lacked consistency and faults started to creep in quicker and quicker. I think it’s been a long time since I have wanted to cry after a match but that was one of the days. The other defeat came a bit faster. The feet were just not moving, mentally I was as locked out as a person can be (bomb could have exploded next to me and I would have just shrugged) and everything besides my BH was just below average.
The whole match situation leads me to the discussion about diesel cars. One of the Sundays when I once again dragged myself to a 8 AM lesson, the coach said “you are what we call a diesel”. And to be honest, he is not wrong. For the context: we played 2 games at the end of the lesson and I lost the first without winning a single point and won the second without losing a single point. I have always felt like I cannot get going quick enough right at the start of the match which results me in often losing 2-3 games and then I need to play catch up to turn the score in my favor. This is really fucking annoying. Not sure why I’m actively making my life harder every time I step on court but getting my head right from the get go would fix a number of problems. Sometimes the mental aspect of sports really sucks ass.
Total number of hours spent on court between 05/05 and 04/06: 14
~ lock tf in – S.