Hi and welcome to Double Fault. My name is Andrew and I'm on a journey to compete at the Pan Pacific Masters Games in November of 2024. That's 466 days away. Now that time is ticking away so quickly, I cannot believe it. I've had a two week break from publishing any podcasts because there's always a break during the school holidays for competition, for group classes, for a lot of things. So I haven't really had much to say. I haven't been lax, though. I have actually been out there practicing my serves. I've been hitting the balls against the walls. I've got a couple of hitting partners I've been playing with and I've been working on getting back into running. And finally, I can say that my injured Achilles is well, it's like at 95%. I can now run a couple of kilometers without any pain. I can do a 6 or 7 kilometer bush walk without any problems. So I can I can honestly say that I think in another month or two it will be back to normal and I'll be able to go out for a decent amount of running and do some more fitness exercises in the way of short sprints and the like to try and get my fitness up to a point where I'll be able to keep up with some of my younger competitors in the matches that I play now. The first the first match of the new semester is coming up. I'll be playing against a woman who I have played before.
She's coming back from having played as a teenager. She's coming back as an adult. So she's had a long break. She's very rusty. I've beat her the last couple of times and I don't know how I'll go this time around. Every time I play her, she seems to get better and she has that benefit of muscle memory, The muscle memory of having played as a youth, which people have played in their teens, and they come back and they pick up the game again so quickly and they get really good, really quickly. And it's it makes it really difficult to win any points against them. So hopefully I'll put up a good showing for myself. I'll watch the I watched part of the Wimbledon grand final, Carlos Alcaraz versus Novak Djokovic. It was it was something you know, Carlos is down the first set. I don't know. Maybe he was a little nervous or maybe he just wasn't, you know, maybe he was just taking a bit of time to get into the swing of things. So he was down six one in the first set. But after that, the game really became a battle of two very, very elite sports people playing tennis at their best. And it was it was good fun to watch. It was unfortunately, I couldn't watch the whole game. It was a five hour match and I had to go to bed. It was in Australia. It started at 11:00, so apparently finished around 4:00 in the morning and I just couldn't do it.
But I did watch some of the extended replays and the gameplay looked absolutely excellent. That's the third time those two have played each other. So before that they'd won one each. This time around it was, it was just tennis, it was good tennis, it was fast tennis and it was it was good fun watching these these people play at that level. And, you know, you know, you're never going to be that good. So it's good to know that I've got lots of upside available to me in my game. So I'm going to be playing a night game at some very good local courts. Why don't you come along with me and I'll run through the game and hopefully it'll be entertaining and I will come out having played a good game against a worthy opponent. All right. Okay. Here we are at Tennis Valley Court ten. It's a beautiful night. Not too cold. Unseasonably not too cold. Actually, it's a bit worrying. So I'm in Sydney and the weather. The last few days have been over 20 degrees, which is, you know, we're in winter. This is pretty unusual. And I know that none of the northern hemisphere, you know, it's getting some really hot temperatures. And I'm a little bit concerned that this summer here is going to be an absolute scorcher. So I'm up for a game in 15 minutes. It's the first game of the new term and hopefully it will be a bright start to the next few weeks.
So I've had a couple of weeks off of making podcasts because there just isn't much between school terms in Sydney in the way of tennis. There's a few social hits and a group here and there, but they're not very exciting. And the only exciting thing that really has happened has been the Wimbledon final. I watched the first set and a half between Alcaraz and Djokovic, and those guys were on fire. I mean, Alcaraz got off to a bit of a bit of a shaky start, but once they settled in those two guys, there's a reason why they're the top players in the world and they showed so much skill on the courts. You can't even dream of playing like that. It's just amazing. Tennis, you know, it is a little bit inspiring. It makes you want to play better, play harder because you see players like that and you can see what's possible. And while it might be a little bit out of my realm of expertise, my realm of skills, you can see that there's such a big gap between my game play and their game that there's plenty of room for improvement for me. And I still got there, still won't even get close to them. But you know, there's a there's a big upside to my game play that's still available to me. So I will keep on keeping on. I do have a goal. I think it's important to have a goal and that goal is still more than a year away, so I've got time to improve and I will keep on being inspired by excellent tennis.
Like the game I watched the night before last. My opponent for tonight used to play as a young woman. She had a very big break and she came back to playing last year. So I have played her before and I did win, but I know that she's getting better really quickly, as you do when you've got some background skills that you've picked up in your youth. So I'm expecting a tough game tonight and I will go out there and do my best and not try and do anything. Tricky stuff. I'll try and hit it too hard as I have a habit of doing and keep everything reasonably simple. It's ten minutes till game time. I'll just have a little wander around just to be a lot of doubles playing happening around here at the moment. And some of these groups, you know, they come out and they've got plates and they've got bottles of wine and it looks also pleasantly social. It makes it very tempting to get involved in something like that for myself, except I actually don't have a group to do it with. It certainly does look very pleasant, especially on a nice night like tonight. Oh, it looks like I got the court to myself. Let's get a quick couple of balls. Throw them up a little Warmed up enough for a few.
Said hills. Valleys. Uh, hills Hills it is. You choose. I'll receive. Okay.
All right. Here we go. First game of the semester. Oh, boy. Okay, So this was actually a really good game. And the score doesn't really reflect how close the game actually was. I know it was 663 because obviously I'm putting this dialog in after the match, but a couple of the games went to deduce a few times and one of them went to Deuce. I think it must have been 5 or 6 times. So it it just it was actually closer than it seemed. I did come over the line and win the game, and I like to think that I played a good game. My service game was on point. I did LAX off a little bit in the second set, as I do sometimes, because I'll talk about that later anyway. But I think my opponent was very good. She played a very good game and I was just a little bit more on top of my game tonight, so I get to play her again at least one more time during the course of this competition. And I will not let my guard down because I know that she's coming to win. And so I'm like, I'm coming to win, too. I'm not out there to lose a game. I'm trying to put my serious face on and not going out there to, well, I'm going out there to have a good time, but I'm not going out there to throw points away. I'm not going out there to make it easy for the opponent.
So all in all, a good night, a good match, competitive. And, you know, I've got a smile on my face because I'm a winner. But, you know, it was still a good match regardless of whether I was winning or losing. And I appreciate the opponent and her skill levels as well. She's definitely getting better, but I think I'm getting better. Also, I think putting a lot of practice in really helps my game play. So that was it. First game of the new semester. And I just wanted to spend a bit of time after each game this semester and talk a little bit about the game, the good points, the bad points, while it's fresh in my mind. So while I'm driving home here in this particular case. So this this woman had a really weak serve and I always have trouble with a weak serve knowing what to do with it. But in the end, I just hit really, really soft returns, like just over the net. And that was getting me my points back straight away because she was standing back on the baseline and didn't have enough time to run up to the jubilee. Little balls. I was dropping over the net. So that's that's one strategy, I guess. And it may not work with everyone, but it certainly worked with her. And maybe it just is not a bad thing to do on a soft serve, hitting a cross-court return, but like really cross court that seemed to work as well, but had a lot of had more of an error rate than just dropping it over the net.
So the game was six, six three my way. And I think I think I deserved to win that game. I played well. My serves weren't well, apart from a few little hitches here and there. Did a few double faults in a row. Sometimes, you know, they come and they go and you know, that's a mental thing. And towards the end of a game like that, you know, it was an hour and a half. You know, I think I start to get a bit weary, especially at this time of night. It's 930 now, and that's okay. It's just something I need to get over. Maybe it's a fitness thing, but I think it's more like a mental thing. I think I need to have more mental strength and not lose focus because I tend to lose focus after a while. I really enjoy playing tennis, but I have the same thing watching TV. I'll get a movie on Netflix or whatever, and if it's more than an hour long, I'll have to sit and watch it in two sittings. And I think that tennis is a little bit like that for me too. It gets on to like an hour of play or something and I start getting distracted and thinking of other things and, you know, throwing away points. And today's game showed exactly that, and I've shown it in the past as well, where I'm up six love in the first game and I'm still winning the second game.
But I've given away three games and for no other reason that my focus is just dropped off. Towards the end there, I actually started refocusing. I realized I was losing focus and I tried to really get get that focus back. I think my game play was okay. I was a bit late to a few of the balls when she hit the ball. She was hitting really hard, really deep and they were catching me off guard occasionally and I was getting them back. But they were they weren't great returns. Anyway, that's my thoughts on this game. It was an enjoyable game and and yeah, so next week it'll be another game with another person and we'll see how that one goes. Okay, so that was a really good game. I came out on top. I'm very pleased with that. The last time I played this woman, I think it the second set went down to I think we had one set each and we had to play a tie break. I did win that time on the tie break, but it was it was a hard going. So I'm looking forward to my next game next week. The second competition that I usually play in hasn't started yet, but it will start in the next few weeks. So I will be playing two games a week and I'm also going to be running more.
I'll be hopefully getting into a little bit of sprints, short sprints and some footwork exercises to try and get a bit lighter on my feet because I do tend to get glued to the ground sometimes and I'm not lively enough on my feet to get in a good position, hit balls. So I think that doing some some agility exercises will be good. I've also got a set of juggling balls. I'm trying to I'm trying to learn how to juggle. I've actually just got to the point where I can do something called a flash, which is basically being able to juggle three balls one, two, three and catch, catch, catch. And I can I can do that a few times. Now. I can't seem to get past that point though. I'm a bit stuck and it's taken me quite a while actually. I didn't realize how how bad I was with my eye hand coordination until I started this. Even just throwing one ball from one hand to another at a juggling height. That was that took me a few days to actually get the hang of and do properly. So without actually looking at the hand that's catching and just throwing it at a good height. And then I changed over to two balls and that actually took that took quite a while to get two balls working. And now that I'm doing a three ball flash, I'm hoping to get to something called a qualifier, which is basically catching each ball twice.
So six throws and six catches and hopefully I'll be able to do that in the coming weeks. Hopefully that'll improve my hand coordination and it will have some effect on my on my tennis game. I've read a few articles that say that juggling is very good for your tennis game. I know this tennis player, IGA Swiatek. Is that how you say it? I'm not sure she's Polish, but she can juggle and she does it. I believe she's been caught out juggling before or juggling tennis balls before some of her matches. So she obviously thinks it's a good idea to she's a very good player and I'm planning on making it part of my warm up routine once I get the hang of being able. To do it, which may take, I don't know, it might take a few more weeks or maybe even take it a couple of months. Who knows how long it takes. I read some articles which suggest that it takes about five hours in total to practice. We'll see how we go there. Anyway, that's the week that was and the week that will come. And in a couple of days I will be out there on the court playing yet another match against someone who I haven't played against before. So I'm looking forward to that. So I'm Andrew and this is Double fault and thanks for listening. And there'll be a new episode coming up in the next week.
