7-06-18 (Friday) Pickle-Ball.

7-06-18 (Friday) Pickle-Ball.

Fridays are huge for me because I look forward to Pickle-Ball so much.  But today was a day that I could have done without.  Long story short, I still swept all the games, four games in all, but the way I got to the wins was so messy and junky, it was more frustrating and disappointing than glory in victory.

The first game was a usual warm-up game, and I was making the regular handful of errors but played pretty cleanly.  I didn't hit any "Incredible" shots in this game.  A lot of my points were off of John's errors.  My serve was pretty unreturnable for most of the day. Or at least John wasn't able to return many of my serves.  Game One score was 15-9.  In game two, things started to fall apart, but it wasn't really noticeable.  The one big thing was that the number of longer rallies was really low.  Most of the points were less than five strokes.  Again, many were just bad returns of serve.  I started to hit my forehands into the net a little more, but not so much as to cause alarm.   I hit some really good serves that cut a really tight angle.  The Game Two score was 15-11.  Game three is where it totally unraveled.  Right from the start of the game, I was unable to keep anything over the net or in the court.  It was so bad that I was down by 3-12.  But lucky for me, John seemed to fold as well.  My serve also started to shank.  I hit more faults in this game alone than did in all the other games this week and last week combined.  It was just mind-boggling.   Then, this happened at least 10 times.  I would hit a great wide serve, I would get the return I expected, but then I would shank it into the net or out.  And the opposite court was wide open.  But I was able to chip away and the lead, finally taking the game 15-12.   The final game was going to be a blowout, I had a 13-2 lead, then I just couldn't score, and John came back to 6 points, but then I finally closed out the match.  In that disastrous third game, every time I hit a bad shot, I would say something like, "COME ON!", or "NO!".  But finally, I just shut up and got down to business.  I would say nothing on my bad shots and just play.  I think I was able to concentrate and focus more when I wasn't distracted by my own commentary.

In the end, I burned 1031 kcal.  I hope to be a lot better the next time you return.