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May. 9th, 2026 12:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
badfalconHoly shit y'all, I think I'm ded
So. Went down to the tennis court again this evening (side note - super proud of me for managing that, thank you benzodiazepine for your assistance) and while Li wasn't planning on playing because vertigo sucks, they very kindly came with to carry shit for me because that's hard to do on crutches.
We bought one of those Movemate tennis trainer sets - you know the ones: weighted base, elastic string attached to a ball, promises of solo practice and improved timing.
In my head, this was going to be fairly chill. A few whacks at the ball. Practice aiming. Start to figure out the rhythm for returns. Gentle practice without spending half the session chasing tennis balls around the court like exhausted labradors.
Reader.
Reader, I was a fool.
It turns out you have to hit that ball hard to generate enough momentum for it to bounce back properly. For the first ten minutes, I genuinely thought I had somehow assembled it wrong because the ball would just sort of… flop sadly away from me.
But then I started figuring it out.
A little more power. Better angle. Better timing.
And suddenly the ball was actually coming back.
Not consistently. Not gracefully. There was still a fair amount of chaos involved. But I managed sequences of four or five returns in a row, occasionally with a double bounce, and for the first time I could really feel myself starting to understand how the racket and ball are supposed to work together.
Of course, there was a price to pay.
Currently:
my abs hurt
my shoulder hurts
my legs feel like concrete
several muscle groups I did not previously know existed have apparently unionised in protest
And honestly? It feels great.
Not in a 'fitness influencer enlightenment' kind of way. More in a 'holy shit, my body actually did a thing' way.
The really amazing part is that while my muscles are screaming, my joints are… a bit offended, but nowhere near as catastrophic as I’d feared. Considering how anxious I was about how my body would cope with tennis in general, that feels huge.
A few weeks ago, I genuinely thought we’d manage maybe ten minutes on court before giving up.
Now I’m standing here with aching abs from accidentally giving myself a full-body tennis workout because I got too invested in trying to return a rebound ball correctly.
And somewhere in the middle of all of this, there’s a completely new level of respect forming for professional tennis that I genuinely didn’t fully get before today. Because it’s one thing to watch it on TV and think be blown away with what Jannik et al can do, and another thing entirely to try to match even a fraction of that pace and immediately understand how much strength, timing, coordination, and repetition it actually takes.
How the fuck do these people do this for HOURS? Not just survive it, but sustain intensity, accuracy, movement, and decision-making point after point after point. It’s honestly ridiculous in the best possible way.
Li is being annoyingly logical and pointing out that they've all been playing since the racket was bigger than them. And they do it every day. For a long time. And they pay people lots of money to help them.
And it’s made me look at players I already admired - especially Jannik - with even more awe. I was already impressed by his ball striking, the clean power, the way it looks so effortless on screen. But actually standing there trying to generate controlled pace myself? Suddenly that 'effortless' part looks like pure illusion created by thousands and thousands of hours of work. The precision, the timing, the ability to repeat that level under pressure - it’s a completely different universe.
So now I’m not just sore and slightly smug about surviving another session. I’m also just… quietly in awe of what tennis actually is at a high level.
I'm also ready to go again next week.
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