Today didn't start out as I was hoping. I was supposed to do some work for school, but because someone didn't fulfill their duty, I was forced to waste a day and push the work to tomorrow. My son came back from Tokyo yesterday and we were planning to play tennis for a couple of hours from 5pm to 7pm, then I had my regular tennis club from 7pm to 9pm. Yep, that is a lot of tennis. That wouldn't be so bad, but it was close to freezing temperatures outside so I was getting ready with a lot of layers. Also, I knew I wouldn't be in the mood to do anything, so in the early afternoon, I got my Ab EMS done. I was going to do the Dead Hang also, but I got caught up in helping my wife with some house chores and before I knew it, it was time to go.
My son and I don't usually play matches, so we just started off as usual. An extra long warm up, followed by simple stroke practice through regular rallies. But I wanted to do a little practice in singles point play, so I asked if I could serve some points. My son capitulated. So, I started serving, point after point. I hadn't intended to play a match, but we were both sort of keeping score, and before I knew it, I had served and won enough points to have won two games straight. Then my son asked if he could serve. I really wanted to practice receiving a fast serve, so I said, "Sure". We started acknowledging out match, so we actively started keeping score. My son, also easily won two games. So I started serving again while keeping score. I lost my first service game but won the second. Game count was 3-3. Then when my son served his first game, and I had a break point, but I couldn't convert, and I had another break point in the second game, but I ended up losing both games. My son was now up 3-5. I got the serve back and pretty handily won the game. Time was short, so I told him that I wanted a chance to break his serve, so I gave up my second game and let him either serve out the set, or we tie. I jumped to Love-40 and then he hit a good serve to go 15-40. But I finally was able to close out the game, breaking him. Game count 5-5. Then we had to go to our respective next sessions, me to my club and my son to his friend. We played standard rules, and about three games had multiple deuces and ads, so the game actually went pretty long. That 5-5 set was close to an hour long. It was a lot of fun, and I was actually very surprised that I was able to keep up with my son. I thanked him for taking it easy on me, but he said that he was playing at 100%. I'll take it! It was a great practice for the up coming tournament.
The Club was extremely sparse at the beginning. There were only four of us at the beginning and I was already warmed up, but I did warm up drills with a partner for close to half an hour until some other members finally arrived. There were only 11 members total that came, so we had a lot of practice chances with a lot of rotations. Menu for the practice session was as usual, starting with Stroke/Volley. Since we got a late start, we did that for a long time, then switched to Point Simulation. We did that to the end. This was the last club session of the year so we all said our end of the year greetings and closed out the club activities for 2017. These last three months as a member of this club has boosted my skills and more importantly my confidence in my game, so I am really thankful for this club. I look forward to seeing what will happen with my skills in the coming year. I really want more consistency and stability with my strokes.
I was exhausted when I got home. I haven't played that much tennis in a long time and my body was feeling it. But I had to get in my Dead Hang for the day. My right forearm, from the beginning of the tennis at 5pm was already feeling a sore pain, and after all that tennis, it was tired and very sore. I didn't want to hurt it or strain it, so I decided to do a lot of 30 second intervals, and lose the weights. I could feel the strain pain right from the beginning of the first hang. But it was actually getting a bit easier as the intervals progressed. I ended up with 30x7 seconds, 50 seconds, then 30x2 seconds. for a total of 5:20. The pain was very present during every hang. I want to push, but not at the risk of the tournament, so I'm placing the tournament prep as priority over logging a long initial hang. But after the tournament is finished, I will continue to do the Dead Hang, not as a challenge, but as a move to keep strengthening my grip strength, then, I will go for that 2 minute mark.
In the end, I burned 2417kcals. That is almost a pound's worth of calories. I was VERY happy with the big burn today.
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