Alright, I think this is the first entry I've made since starting Pain and Torture, or at least the first one that will talk about that. I've been super stoked on squash lately, and have turned a lot of that energy into training hard. I'm jogging for about a half hour two to three times a week on my lunch break, and doing Pain and Torture (court movement and speed training with a dash of drills on top) once a week. At the end of the day my body is tired, but I wake up feeling well-rested and refreshed. I feel very fit, and that's a pretty good feeling.
We have a pretty sweet Pain and Torture group: Bevan, Drew, myself, Emily Paton, Emily Parsons, and Nikki. Bevan and Drew run hard, and the girls are all several thousand times faster than I am, so I've got a lot of motivation to push.
Playing league, taking lessons with Dan, hitting with better players than myself, and our hitting drills have made me very aware of a few things I need to work on, so, let's bring out the littany..
- High Backhand Volleys
- Fitness
Whoa. I suck. Seems to me like improving and playing squash is laced throughout with moments where I go "how on earth do I get by with shots like that?". Lo and behold, high backhand volleys are just such a shot. Horray.
I mentioned me trying to work on getting my elbow up higher for this shot, and that ties in with the other thing I need to work on, which is racquet preparation. These two are mutually inclusive - they both relate to setting myself up properly for a good shot. The more you play squash, the more time you start to feel like you have between each shot, and to make a return. I think this is owed at least partially to learning to prepare yourself as much as possible before making a shot (and I suspect this is a factor in most sports, with the exception of Nascar racing, where it is overshadowed by the advantage of missing part of your frontal lobe).
So, I've been making a real effort towards this end, and really started to notice a difference last Thursday when I was drilling with Sarah and Emily. There's still a long way to go, but at least I can start to feel/see some results. Racquet preparation (actually, preparation in general) is an easy thing to do - I mean, it's not like training yourself to swing a racquet properly, or to boast at the right angle - it's not so much a skill as it is mental training (which I guess is a skill in itself). Because of this, there's really no excuse for me having taken so long to start thinking about it.. but that's just the way she goes (old trucker proverb).
This one isn't really a skill so much as training - but I'm planning on putting a fair amount of effort into improving my fitness over the summer, and so I hope to have a real advantage when I step on court against someone that hasn't put in this kind of effort.
There aren't really any specific steps to doing this - just me going jogging, getting good rest, and eating healthy. I still don't really have any idea how to measure how well this is coming along, other than to see how long it takes me to recover between games and at the end of a match. That being said, I've been jogging for about three weeks now, and doing pain and torture for the same amount of time, and I feel like I'm starting to notice a difference. I can't remember how many weeks it's meant to take before you can visually notice changes to your body based on your workout routine (I think it's about three weeks), so this could just be a placebo. Either way, feels good.
I think that most of my focus this summer is going to be spent on fitness, along with tidying any other big errors I notice in my game until league starts up in the fall. Bevan and I are both planning to tryout for division 1, but I don't really think that I'm likely to make that cut, so I'm hoping to get into division 2 with a reasonably high rank. This should be possible if I stay steady with my current pace.
I guess posting the weaknesses in my game on a public website may make it more likely that those weaknesses will be exploited, but my thinking is along the lines of "what better way to practice a shot you suck at than by having people try to exploit it against you". The more people that know what I suck at and use it against me, the faster I'll learn to make it correctly.
I just finished editing some dance videos, and will put those up, along with an entry about what I'm currently working on shortly.
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