Post-game Pain

I got some Saturday play. It’s odd to me that the weekend seems to be the hardest time for me to find games but today, well it started with my favorite way to start the day, early with pickleball. We had 8 people and played for 2.5 hours with limited breaks and hard play. I am in pain and parts of my body that I had no idea could hurt are hurting. It’s wonderful.

It’s been a while since I’ve updated the “injury” portion of my daily briefings. Today I can add 2. I got hit in the nose, which is pretty impressive since I wear a hat. The ball hit the bill of my hat and still found a way to clip my nose which may be an indicator my nose is bigger than I realize. I thought ears continued to grow as we age, not our nose? Anyway, I also got hit in the nipple which was a real stinger. Neither shots were necessarily hard hit balls but man, what they hit was enough to make me pause.

We had an interesting mix of people. I think everyone was excited to get the opportunity to do their workout so it didn’t seem like anyone was irritated by the different levels of play on the court. This is one of the younger groups for me and they have a lot more speed and a lot more power. But I feel like I made a lot of good decisions and I definitely was able to keep them back a little bit with my serve.

I had at least 2 serves that were rec calls, like, for sure, they would have been out in a tournament but fortunately, they told me that so I was able to adjust. I think knowing I was getting a bit too close to the line was a generous notification and very helpful for me. Other than those 2 and 1 that I pulled too far, I did alright. I used a lot of different serves just for variety. I had a speed serve, deep serve, my angle serve, I hit a lot of backhands and just for fun I did a windmill.

I had a put away with my right hand that wasn’t off a lob so that was exciting. Usually I hit the wall with those so getting it in bounds was nice. I had a little bit of an ATP drought the last few days but today I managed to reconnect with the fun shot.

My drops were alright and when I decided to drive, shake, and bake I did ok with that too. It was just a pretty good day of play. I love it when I sweat and really have to work on the court but holy moly am I hurting. My lower back, my hips, my you name it, it hurts right now. I’m going to need to hydrate as much as possible and get my recovery going quickly.