My path to tennis didn’t start with a class, being bored, or playing with friends. Nope, it started with riding a bike. During college I discovered road cycling and fell in love. It was not long until I had become totally consumed with the sport. For me, cycling is the perfect mix of everything I liked and needed. I could bore you for hours on the greatness of cycling, but I will spare you that. As I became more proficient in the science of the sport, the improvement in performance was no longer enough. I knew my body, the training methods that worked for me, and what to do to get better. Sure, there were new research papers outlining new methods that I would dive into, but the wasn’t enough. That’s when I looked to racing to fill the gap. Implementing strategies in races and in training to compete against others was the missing piece.

All was great with my cycling hobby but then the normal growing up things happened. Life events took place, kids were born, jobs became busy. The final straw was an injury that happened while unloading a swing. Initially the injury was misdiagnosed by myself and my primary care physician. After months of limping around I eventually pushed to see a PT. On a positive note, the PT was quick to properly identify the issue. On a negative note, the issue was a herniated disc. PT treatment was attempted but due to my situation surgery was required.

After so much time off I had gained over 50 pounds of fat and swapped some of my original muscle for more fat. I had also lost essentially all my fitness and flexibility. That is when the reality of racing again hit me. In many ways I was already bumping up to my genetic limit. In my best form my watts/kg was in the low cat 2 range. To improve much more would take a massive increase in time investment that I simply didn’t have, and honestly, didn’t want to give. Not to mention as a tall lanky person I wasn’t built to be a good cyclist. Cycling continued to offer me a lot of the same benefits as before, but the ability to become “better” and compete was no longer there. At this point I had lost all motivation to get back into cycling.

I began to consider other sports to focus my energy on. My younger brother had played tennis in highschool and did very well. I would hit with him a little here and there but that’s about it. Although I did consider playing in higschool I never did. My brothers real love has always been basketball but his growth spurt hadn’t arrived. In many ways he was looking to tennis as an alternative sport. I didn’t want to step in and muddy what would become his new passion so I never pursued it. While I did my thing with cycling my brother would go on to play in college and become a very good coach.

As I looked at it, tennis seemed to be the perfect fit. I knew from just hitting many years ago I would enjoy it. Having a brother that is already a coach is an obvious plus. As a 6'2" guy with something like a 6'7" wingspan I am in many ways “build” for it. Well at least built more for it than for cycling. I am so late to the game that I will always be able to improve the my skills. Playing an impact sport will be good for my body as I age and something I was notably lacking with cycling. And finally it would give me a competitive outlet that I no longer had with cycling.

With the decision made I reached out to my brother, he sent me a racket and the journey began. It took a couple years before I really started playing but I will cover that in another post.