15 Luv

A journey to the Pan Pacific masters games. Putting on and losing weight with a vengeance. Losing some and winning some, the games go on, even with a lousy Achilles injury.

Doublefault a journey to the Pan Pacific Masters games 2024

Transcript

Hi, I'm Andrew, and this is double fault. I'm on a journey to compete in the Pan Pacific Masters Games on the beautiful Gold Coast in Queensland in November of 2024. I said last week that I've gone into the realm of obese. My weight is way too heavy and I've gone on a diet as of last week. I just wanted to share for a few minutes of this podcast this week how that's going. I weighed myself in at 107.1 kilos, and it was it was a shock. I don't think I've ever been that weight or maybe I've been that way in a long time ago, but not not for a long, long time. Whenever I weigh myself and I'm that heavy, I just it just breaks me. It just freaks me out. And I have to lose weight. And I've taken different approaches over time. I've taken the CSIRO diet, I think it's called the Total Wellbeing Diet, if you want to check it out. I've tried cutting down on food. I've tried running. Really the one that always works for me most is cutting down the carbs, you know, doing the no white diet where you cut out flour, you cut out potatoes, you cut out rice, you know, all the stuff that I like, which is like bread and, you know, chips and stuff like that. I haven't cut that completely out. But what I'm doing this time around is I'm keeping a track on my phone of the calories I've consumed.

Every time I eat something, it goes into the tracker. And at the end of the day, I compare what I've eaten against, what I've burnt on my Garmin watch in the way of calories. And the idea is to run up a deficit of about 1000 or maybe a bit more calories each day. In theory, by the end of the week I should lose a kilo because a kilo is worth apparently about 7700 calories. And we'll see how that goes. So this is the end of my first week and I've gone in for another weigh in. And I've actually weighed myself a couple of times over the course of the week. And I noticed that my weight fluctuates by a lot like a kilo or two kilos over time. But I'm confident that today's weighing is fairly representative of the way I think I should be losing weight given the amount of calories I've burnt this week. So today I weighed in 104.1kg, which is pretty good. It's three kilos down. I was actually five kilos down a couple of days ago. That's what I'm saying about fluctuating. So I'm actually back into an overweight area, but at least I'm out of the obese area. So that's kind of a plus. And hopefully by the end of next week I'll lose another kilo or two, depending on how much effort I put in and how much extra exercise I do.

I looked at my deficit for the course of the week, and it's about it's a bit over 10,000 calories for the first six days. So there's probably a little bit more. As of yesterday, but I haven't actually logged that in my spreadsheet yet. Yes, I keep the spreadsheet for this, so I'll probably burn a lot more calories. Anyway, back to tennis. You know, everyone's got a favorite way of learning skills, whether it's by using a coach or by YouTube or going out practicing stuff or reading things. I've actually done all of those. I think a lot of people these days we look at YouTube and YouTube is like a coach, you know, like Google is is Dr. Google and coach YouTube. And it's interesting when you look at things on YouTube that you'd like to learn a lot better serve or a forehand or backhand or, you know, a smash or lob. There's a lot of things that, you know, tennis requires those skills. And I think that YouTube provides a lot of useful information there, but it's all packaged into small bundles. Like here's one tennis serve technique hit constant service by fitting fixing this one position. And you can learn that in 6.5 minutes. And how about inspired exercises to improve your tennis serve? And that runs for about ten minutes. And the only way to make your serve spin takes a whopping 20 minutes and then, you know, forehands hitting the perfect forehand in five steps.

That takes 30 minutes. And, you know, you get the idea. It's 10 or 20 minutes and you get and you get imparted all the knowledge from an expert coach as to how to do something. Now, that's not going to make you an expert up front, but it's not going to make you an expert up front. You know, you can't learn something in 10 minutes or 20 minutes by watching a video. Not a physical skill anyway. I certainly can't. So you go off and you think after watching a lot of these videos, you realize there's a theme. Depending on what tennis strike you want to do. There's a theme underlying each of these videos and all the coaches, they try and teach you the same kind of thing. For instance, hitting a serve. And you know, the theme will be your traffic position or your racket drop or something like that. And many coaches will have the same theme. They'll vary a little bit on the actual position on the movements. But I think that, you know, everyone's got a different way of playing tennis, so that's kind of fair. I think you take out of YouTube the thing that work for you. You know, you look at a server, a forehand or anyone's tennis technique and everyone's an individual. You watch tennis at the Grand Slams, you watch tennis at the big games around the world, and everyone's got a technique that's all their own.

You know, it could be left handed, you could be right handed, You could be something like slicing or a baseliner Everyone's kind of a little bit different in their own way. And everyone has a different technique, which, you know, at the top end of the game, that's, that's fine. There's obviously no absolute right. Do things because those guys are there and they're all different. So I actually played a game with a guy last week who I'm sure it was. It's actually a competition match and I was sure he's playing forehands on both sides. And I kept looking at him and I said to him, Are you playing forehand on your left hand and your right hand? And he said, Yeah, I do that sometimes and it really confused me. But, you know, it's one of those things that you've got to work around and everyone you play against is different. Anyway, I think YouTube's really useful. I think it's a worthwhile place to go and get some tips, but you just keep in mind that you have to look around and pick up things that really work. Yeah, so play the game this morning with a friend of mine, it was about six degrees, but the weather forecast said six degrees feels like two degrees. So it was really cold and it was really windy.

And it was one of those games where I started off really well and he started off really bad and I kept playing at my same level. And he just he started off serving badly in the first couple of games and, you know, all his serves were going long or into the net. He's one of these guys that really likes to hit it hard, and then he just suddenly changed and he suddenly started serving softies and really short and that caught me out and I was running to the net. And, you know, sometimes I'd just get to it, get my racket on it, and just dinky, give him a dinky return. He just put it away every time. And I'm not quite sure to do that. I'm standing about a meter behind the baseline, maybe a meter and a half, because I know when he hits them, they're going to go a long way. But that puts me a long way away from the net. So if it's a little dinky serve, I've got a long way to run to try and recover the ball. And I'm not that fast at the moment. I'll get faster, I'm losing weight, I'm getting fitter, and I think that I really need to keep an eye on what sort of a stroke the guy on the other side of the net is doing. You know, you can you can pick it.

It doesn't give you much time after he's hit it to work out what to do. But you can pick a soft serve and someone's winding up for a big smack. So I'm going to pay a bit more attention to that. I've got a game tonight with an unrated player. It's at 730, so it's under lights and it's actually on a court that's got really good lights for a change. So I'm looking forward to that. It'll be cold though. Anyway. I'll be wearing my lapel mic and maybe I'll do a bit of a breakdown afterwards on how it actually went. I'll be keeping an eye out on his strokes and how he approaches the ball to try and work out what the ball will do. So come with me to my match tonight and have a listen and we'll see how we go. All right. Let's go and play this girl. It's another beautiful night. Know I don't like the weather getting cold, but it's calm. It's clear the courts are empty from my opponent sitting there waiting. This will be my second match this week. The first match, unfortunately. I went down 6362 against the guy. The crazy spinny serve so fast and looked like a banana when it came through the air at me. Hello. The mighty one. Sorry. The traffic's really bad. Oh, no worries. Okay. On my toes. Okay, let's see what a backhand looks like. Oh, yeah, That's all right. Nice.

So this match I played against was a woman, an American woman. And she she was unrated. And she said to me, look, my coach said I should try playing competition. And she's just been playing squads and taking the odd lesson. So I thought, I don't know what I thought. I thought maybe I was going to be in for a easy ride. But she gave me a solid run for my money. She started off, I mean, a little weak and I won the first game. So this is a fast four format. So it's two two games, first to four with a tie break at at three all. And she she started off pretty weakly and I started off pretty well. And I've got to say, this is one of those games where my service just absolutely fell to pieces. I lost count of the number of double faults I had. I'm not saying that as an excuse, but it's just shows that once something in your game goes bad, it just keeps going bad and you can't you can't fix it mid game. I really should work on getting a reliable second serve because my second serve is not that great either. You know, I would be better off just poking it over the net like a beginner at this rate because right now I'm just hitting them long or just hitting most of the serves into the net.

So the first set I was up one love and then she came back and and you know, I won four three So we went to a tie break at the tie break. You know, it was pretty close anyway but I was first to seven there, which is how we do our tie breaks, which is the first to seven by two points and then a sudden death at nine points points each. And the second set, you know, she we I won again but it was again it was a tie break. It was four three. And we got to the tie break. And, you know, she was actually up five one. And I came back from five one and I won that tie break, seven five. So I won four, three, four, three. What's interesting is all the servers were little patty cake serves. They were a bit harder than normal ones, but most of them came in. I don't think she I think she double faulted maybe 3 or 4 times. Unlike me, my serves were great when they went in really fast, really solid, and she was returning every single one of those suckers. So she's very quick on the return. And when she was actually playing, every ball she hit was really flat and really deep, and they just kept catching me off guard. So I'd be standing on the court where I shouldn't be in no man's land.

And she just hit them past my feet or at my feet or long. And I just had so much trouble getting these balls and they were so fast. I don't know how many balls I hit late. I got a lot of lucky shots in. I must have hit about five half volleys and a few that I don't know how I got my racket on them, you know, They were so flat. They were just bouncing, barely, you know, a hand's breadth above the court. And I'd quite often manage to get my my racket under them for a slice backhand return. And a couple of those were actually winning shots, but they were just so hard. And it just goes to show you don't need to be playing competition to be successful at playing competition. And I think she'll she'll do well at at this level, at this competition. So it was a good, fun game. It was really close. I think so many of those points went up to multiple deuces. So it took quite a long time. You know, normally these fast fast4 formats, you finished in under an hour, but this one took nearly a whole hour and a half, which is the time allotment for these games anyway. So there you go. You never know what you get in these games. The other competition game I played this week, I played against a guy who looked like he was in his 50s.

He was fairly light, you know, he was fairly slight build and he beat me six, three, six two and I just couldn't return his serves because they had so much spin and slice on them. They just came through the air like a banana. And then they hit the ground and bounced off to the side and sometimes they bounce so far off I just I just couldn't get my racket on them. And they were really fast too. He did quite a few double faults as well, and I had a good serving game, but seriously. And he ran everything down. We had a lot of baseline rallies that just went on and on and on. But he just out served me and really, yeah, looking at both of these games, I really need to work on that second serve and have a reliable it's always going to go in second serve sort of thing so that I'm not throwing points away every. Game in the hope of getting a great serve in That's hard to return because I think the the odds are just not in my favor. You know, it's just not you know, it's just I'm just my own worst enemy at times. Anyway, that's it for the two competition games this week played a couple of socials as well. That was a mixed bag of results. Most of the social guys I hit with are actually away at the moment, so ones traveling overseas and other ones interstate.

So I have enough hitting partners for four days a week and I think I'm going to try and get another one for another morning because I play before work usually about 6:00 or 630. Depends on where I play because not all the courts have lights that are on at that time morning that you can actually organize to have lit. That's about it for this week I'm Andrew this is double fault. Join me next week I'll play a few more competition games in the Pan Pacific Masters games next November. So it's it'll be an interesting journey and I'm really trying to wrap myself up. My UTR is now 2.41, so I must be doing something right. That's up from about 2.3 a couple of weeks ago. I think it's just dribbling up because of the way that UTR works with various results and players you've played in the past changing their rankings. So it's slowly dribbling up and hopefully I'll reach UTR three by the end of this year, maybe more, maybe by the time Pan Pacific Masters Games come around. I'll try and hit that magical UTR five number, which is where I'd really like to be before I before I get there. So. So that's it for this week. Have a good week and I'll be back reporting next week.