I could feel it. My body was getting stronger. My endurance was growing. My mind was becoming clearer. My self-esteem was improving. It's amazing how the simple act of exerting oneself (particularly when improving) has such far-reaching impact on our lives.
I had just dropped fifteen pounds in a final push to start a series of tournaments designed to really prepare me for the Nationals for the first time in six or seven years. I was excited, and I couldn’t wait to get going. I entered the New York Open, and much to my surprise, I got to the finals.
I was playing Hugh Evans, a former number one player from Wales, and a gifted shot-maker. He dominated me for the first two games, but in the third, things were starting to click. There was a full house at the Printing House club in lower Manhattan, and they were enjoying the match. And so was I.
As the third game went back and forth, I realized that I was totally into the match. At nine-all, I felt that if I could win the game, I was back into the match. I wasn’t nervous. I was completely enjoying the competition, the fight.
A few years ago, I had almost forgotten that feeling. I had let my body go. I was overweight, I was finding it hard to get motivated to get to the gym, and I was – for the first time in my life – puffing going up the stairs from the subway.
This wasn’t totally my own weak willpower, for my right knee had gradually fallen apart from all the squash and training that I had done over the course of my career. It had gotten so that every time I started to try to get serious about playing squash or working out, I would be able to go for a day or two and then need to take a week off before I could walk again without pain.
I needed to do something.
So, I set a goal and saw a doctor. My knee, it turned out, had a lot of problems (for those who are interested: partially torn ACL, partially torn MCL, a lot of cartilage damage and a torn meniscus). I underwent surgery and started the long road to recovery.
Right after the surgery, I have to admit that I didn’t think I would ever play squash again. I couldn’t straighten my knee for months, and really contemplating a deep knee-bend made me cringe. Squash seemed very distant.
But the body is amazing, and it did heal. After about six months of rehab, I was able to start playing again. I found the trainer who had helped me for the two years prior to winning Nationals more than a decade ago and told him I wanted to get serious again.
It wasn’t easy. For the first year, every time I started to make progress, I tweaked something new. My left groin, my lower back, my right hamstring, my right groin. My body was imbalanced and its secondary muscles were weak. But gradually, they got stronger and more supple.
Then came the time to increase the endurance. Squash is a tough sport in that you need to have aerobic fitness, but you also need anaerobic fitness as well. This means that you have to train both like a sprinter and a marathoner. There is a reason no one competes in both, for training for both is very, very hard.
A friend of mine wanted to train for the NYC Marathon, so I started doing his long runs with him. Over three months we built up from six miles to twenty every Sunday. Then, just a few weeks before the race, he ruptured his Achilles tendon. Another injury. He was terribly disappointed.
As we talked about his injury, the first he had ever had, he talked to me about the frustration and the disappointment. He confessed to seeing people on the street who clearly were not taking care of themselves physically, but who had two completely fine Achilles tendons, and wondering why they were not the ones whose tendons didn’t work. He confessed to feeling more depression than he expected. And he confessed to starting to let himself go. What the hell was the point?
I could identify with him. The knee surgery was my fifth squash-related surgery, and each previous injury had come just as I felt I was about to make a move. A broken hand my junior year in college, torn ligaments in my ankle just as I was starting out on the PSA tour, a torn-and-detached retina when I was ranked number one in the US, and a repeat of that operation a year later.
I told him to hang in there. He came with his girlfriend to watch me play in one of my early rounds of the NY Open and told me that he had entered another Marathon for June of this year. He and his girlfriend had decided that he was not going to let the injury defeat him. I congratulated him. But I didn’t know that another test for me was a day away.
At nine-all in that third game, I was serving with another game point and I dove for a ball. I got it back, but when I tried to rise, I couldn’t. I didn’t know it, but I blew out my shoulder. I tore the rotator cuff, the labrum, ligaments and damaged the bone.
I had my sixth squash-related surgery just before Christmas, and the doctors tell me that I will have about five months of rehab. I am trying hard to not give into that post-injury depression, but it is hard. I am going to miss my first softball nationals ever (I think I am the only person to have played in all of them, but I may be mistaken), and I will have to start that long road again.
The good thing is that I have been through it before. The bad thing is that I know how much effort is involved. But that is the thing that will make it all worthwhile.
Right?
