30 Luv- Bad Achilles and tough education

Playing harder players and playing those whoa are just simply better. Tennis is tough and someone is always going to be a loser.

Especially hard is dealing with and injury and I've been battling with a bad Achilles for months now but it is finally getting better

Doublefault a journey to the Pan Pacific Masters games 2024

Doublefault a journey to the Pan Pacific Masters games 2024

Transcript

Hi there and welcome to Double Fault. My name is Andrew and I'm on a journey to compete in the Pan Pacific Masters Games in Queensland in November of 2024. And this is a record of my journey to compete there. So come and join me on my journey and I'll show you with you, my gameplay, my competition results and the work I'm doing on my fitness and weight. And in the end I'll be in Queensland on the Gold Coast in November of next year. I weighed myself a few weeks ago and I weighed in at 107.1kg, which is it's really heavy for me and puts me in the realm of obesity, which is I never thought I'd actually be obese ever. I'm reasonably fit and active. I probably have a pretty bad diet. And in fact, to get that weight down, I've cut out some things that I would really normally enjoy like pizza, a burger, a beer, bread products, rice, pasta, all that, all that stuff that's low value carbs. I'm going to call it like white carbs and fatty foods and I've kept a log over the last few weeks to to make sure that I'm on track to use more calories than I eat. So I've been keeping a calories in record and a calories burnt record. Thanks, Garmin, for that. And I've been trying to keep a deficit of between 500 and 1000 calories a day. So that means if I exercise more, then I can maybe eat a little bit more.

If I exercise less, then I should eat less. But generally speaking, I'm trying to make a deficit of about 7000 calories a week, which is a little it's worth a little less than a kilogram, I believe. I think a kilogram is worth 7700 calories. So I was 107.1 and now I'm down to 102.1. So I've lost five kilos in the last few weeks, which is heartening. I'm going to keep this up until I get my weight down to under 90kg, which is where I should be. I'm still well, I'm not obese anymore. I'm in the overweight category. To be in a healthy category, I need to be 87 kilos, which that's a long way down. That's 20kg down from my high of a few weeks ago at 20kg. It's a lot. Try picking up 20kg of something, a bag of cement, maybe a bag of soil. It's usually listed on the bag of whatever you want to pick up, how much it weighs, and you imagine picking that up and just holding it around your waist and then running short sprints on the tennis court. It's hard. I mean, not that I've tried it, but I'm obviously carrying it around my waist, but it's like an invisible bag of cement and it's hard and it's it makes you prone to injury. I guess I've got this Achilles problem which has been hanging around for eight months now.

It's finally getting better. But I got that problem on the soccer field and I think I was around about the weight, that heavy weight then. And I just all I did was change direction suddenly on on the grass. And I could just feel that something went really bad really quickly and it's not torn or ruptured or anything like that. But it's just seriously, you know, Achilles injuries, they they take a long, long time to heal. I've had one I've had a couple before. And they've taken the better part of a year to come back to normal. And I can say that my Achilles is right now it's almost back to normal. I can go for a run. And it does kind of hurt the next day, but not in a really bad way. It just hurts, as you know. You know, you're injured and it never hurts the day after the run. So getting back into running, too. So burning a few more calories that way. Anyway, enough about my Achilles. I want to talk a little bit about a couple of the games I've played over the last few days. So I played one game against a very slight woman, an American lady, who actually is who's actually trying to set up a business as a fitness instructor. So she's very lightweight, looks very athletic, and she, she and I took to the courts and had a bit of a warm up.

And I know she's played in her youth because she told me so she's coming back to it. A lot of a lot of people do that. They come back, you know, played as a kid and now I'm going to play tennis again. And you know how that's going to go. They bring a lot of inbuilt skills with them, you know, that they learnt that's embedded in their muscle memory from years of playing as a kid. So he took the court and yeah, she beat me the first. This is a fast format game and she beat me the first set for love. Seriously. She was hitting him deep and making me run around the court like a crazy man. Her serves rarely hit the net and she. She was running down my balls wherever I put them, and I just couldn't catch a break. And then something kind of clicked in my head. You know, sometimes you play tennis and and part of your game just falls to pieces, whether it's your forehand backhand or your serve or whatever. It just falls to pieces and it just won't come good. And mine came good and I actually beat her the next set, four one. So we ended up duking it out for a tie break and I won that seven two and yeah, I won the game. But it makes you wonder sometimes why your game just falls to pieces and then comes good.

I'm sure it's a mental thing. You know, they say tennis is a mental game and. A lot of YouTube videos actually on the mental aspects of tennis. And there's a lot of lot of books about the mental game of tennis, the inner game of tennis, for example, winning Ugly. I think Brad Gilbert spends a bit of time speaking about that part of the game, and it's a real part of it because, you know, I can go out there and I can hit some great shots and you wonder why you just if I can do it a few times, why I can't repeat it for the whole game. I can even hit some great serves even. And you know, seriously, you can't keep it up for the whole game because it ebbs and flows, I think. And you know, your mind gets distracted or I don't know what happens. Your mind starts, you start talking to yourself and telling yourself what to do when your mind already knows what to do. And so I walked away with a bit of a realization of a number of things. And one of those things is that I let myself get distracted and I need to focus more on the game and less on thinking about other things. The other thing that has been catching me out lately and those two competition game was I kind of stopped.

I keep I keep standing in no man's land just a little bit, maybe a half a meter inside the court. And for players that hit deep like this lady, she was just hitting him and they were just landing around my feet and I just was standing in the wrong place and missing balls because I was standing in the wrong place, really, and I just couldn't return those shots. So I've got to be more aware of where I am geographically on the court and make sure that I'm actually either standing behind the baseline or rushing the net and not standing somewhere on the court unless I've got a good reason to be there. One of the other things that has been catching me out lately is people lobbying me, and I think that I can get around that. I just need to watch the other players stroke as they go into it because you can see a lob coming, especially at my level. Players don't hide it. They're just going to lob that ball high and deep and there's enough time usually to run down the back of the field and and recover a lob if you get there if you if you start running early enough and recognizing that I think is another aspect of my game I need to work on. And one last thing I think I've mentioned before is that assumption thing I have. I just I had it in that game.

I've had it in another game since I've mentioned it, but I just kind of assumed that a ball is going to go out and they don't go out, they just land in and I'm just watching it and they just watch it land and I just watch it land in. And I could have got half of these balls, had to be more aware or had I just assumed the other way that if a ball is going to go over the net, it's going to land on the court somewhere and be in a position to recover that ball. If that's the case, same with when I hit a great shot and I look and I think that the other player is not going to retrieve that ball and quite often they do, and I'm guilty of doing exactly that. I go, Wow, that's a great shot. They'll never get that. And and the player on the other side of the net runs over and hits it over the net. And I'm just standing in really the wrong position entirely because I assume they're not going to return the ball anyway. So I'm off to a game tonight, so why don't you come along and join me? Okay, so there's five minutes to go. Might go and warm up with some dynamic string. Play a bit of attention to my calf which is attached to my Achilles, which has given me problems.

I'm doing this stretch where you hang your toes on the stairs and your heel off, so you kind of drop stretch. It's always interesting when you're waiting for a new player because you never know who it is that you're going to get this. There's always a stranger or not always. But sometimes you come up with lots of people you played with previous competition. But this fella, I have no idea. Sometimes they're older people. Sometimes they're really young. I played a 15 year old guy who well and truly showed me how to play. You never can tell I've played a guy the same age as me. It's every ball was a slice, backhand, slice, forehand, slice, serve, slice. And I think he had a single straight shot at me. He's just laughing at me the whole time. Five minutes to go before game time. I think I'm about as ready as I'll ever be. It's funny, you can never really judge who you're playing by, what they look like, what they look like, Claimed one woman last year. She looks like a fish at a school like 16. I think she might have been a bit older than that, but she looked so young and she just proceeded to pick me apart. 15 year old a couple of times where I go, I couldn't really even see her service. They'll coming so fast. Let's have a warm up here.

Here we go. He's just gonna hit them all hard. Yep. So here's a guy who, again, was coming back after a break who played as a teenager. And in this competition, it's. It's a competition. First to six. So regular sets. You just play two sets in a tie break and I'm in I'm in the lowest division for that competition. I'm still at the beginning of the level of competition. I like to think I'm better than that, but apparently I'm not. But that competition is actually quite a difficult competition. And the reason for that is new players will join the comp and they're not rated with a UTR score. And the competition organizers place people on various divisions based on the UTR. And if you don't have a UTR, they just automatically stick you in the lowest division, which is where I am. So this guy, I had a chat to him before the game and I said, Do you play much? He said, Yeah, I played a lot as a teenager and I play a lot with my friends in that, and I just thought I'd start playing competition. And I knew I knew straight away what was going to happen. I could see it. He's got an athletic build, he's a tall bloke. He's he's completely equipped with the right gear. I think he even had two rackets, which. Fair enough. And, and you know, during the warm up, he's hitting beautiful strokes, preparing early, running down balls. He's hitting a variety of different shots.

And and you could see what was coming and he beat me six love, six love. And he was just placing his balls beautifully. He would he would work me into a corner and then hit a ball on the other corner. He would work me around the court to wherever he wanted. He'd just attack my backhand over and over and over again. He he retrieved every everything I could get at him, you know, I did backspins topspins slices. I did drop shots, lobs. He got everything. I think I got one winning shot in and I think I actually played really well, but he just, he just add experience to me. It just I just could not I just couldn't compete with the amount of experience he obviously had in his background and he was really nice about it. He said he, you know, he thought my serves good, which was a nice, nice thing to say. But overall, I walked away feeling like I'd be well and truly shown a lesson of how to actually play the game. It makes you feel quite clumsy. I think sometimes when you see someone who really knows what they're doing and you play against that person and you realize that you're just so outclassed and you just don't look like that other person, your strokes don't look like that other person's stroke, their strokes are clumsy compared to theirs and they're so much calmer on the ball. So hopefully, you know, I'll get to that point where I can play like that at some stage in my tennis playing future.

So the goal for this coming week, I have two competition games coming up, one against an unknown. Again, I don't know how that will go. It's always a mixed bag. It's in that competition where they just drop unrated players so the person could be a fantastic player or could be a mediocre player or it could be at my level. I've got another game against a woman who is really, really close to match to me. V-rally two with her before on a social setting and she and I are probably we're a very close match as far as our game play is concerned and our playmaking, and I think it's going to be a tough game and that'll happen in the coming week. I've also got a bit of a lack of hitting partners at the moment, so I've been using a local wall to practice my swings on. So practicing, preparing earlier, practicing or concentrating a lot on my backhand. So I'm doing a lot of backhand work against the wall to try and get a better topspin backhand. I think I've got a reasonably good backhand slice, but the topspin is just a bit hit and miss at the moment. So I'm trying to make that work a bit better for me. I'm also getting a few runs, so my runs are quite slow. I'm just doing five kilometers every few days, just testing the water with my Achilles and I'm going to start trying to increase the speed that I'm doing for those runs. You know, I went to a class this morning.

It was just two students, which was really great. And the instructor. So we've got a lot of one on one time with them and I kept my Garmin on for about an hour with a game play. And at that time I ran 1.8km, which is about normal for any of my tennis games and burnt nearly 500 calories. So every every hour of tennis, I'm burning about 500 calories, which is really great. And that's about the same as I'm doing during a five kilometer run. I'll be keeping that up. If I can do an hour of tennis and a five kilometer run every now and then, that'll help me to shed some of those kilos. I'm going to start throwing in some calisthenics as well. So some sit ups and some push ups and some stretching work to try and get some core strength up, you know, planks. And I'm going to try and I'm going to try and work a bit more flexibility in fitness in. To my daily routine. So a few push ups a day. It won't take long and sit ups. I don't particularly like push ups. I don't particular like sit ups. I think I read somewhere that Roger Federer never liked push ups either, so I can sympathize with that. Anyway, So that's that's it for double fault and that's it for me. So there are now 531 days till the Pan Pacific Masters Games next year. This is double fault and I'm Andrew and thanks for joining me on my journey.