Bonus Recs #6: Let's talk about tennis

Favorite gear, my racquet pick, and enjoyable tennis media

Strava, if it can be trusted, tells me that I’ve played 250 hours and 57 minutes of tennis in the last year, which is 1,392% more tennis than I played in the year prior to that. It’s still very far from the 10,000 hours to “mastery,” but it’s a big shift of time and energy towards something that previously occupied very little of my life.

Have I done anything else for more than 250 hours in the last year?

There have been many-an-essay written about later-in-life athletics and whether or not you’ve entered the midlife portal, and for me, tennis, which I learned in a purely hobby-istic, gotta-go-to-some-rec-camp fashion as a kid, has been my all-consuming, mental-and-physical-health-improving, joy-inducing portal of my early forties.

I played casually in high school, then got off a waitlist for a small local, clay court club here in Brooklyn last June. Now, I have the great fortune of playing several times a week, have joined a team full of very inspiring women, and play in several USTA leagues around the city. I never thought I’d compete again in any athletics, but I love being on a team full of wise women who span in age from 30s to 70s, and being rooted for and coached at something entirely unrelated to my career and my abilities as a parent.

Tennis also requires a consuming amount of focus and renders me truly unable to think about anything else (news, the fall of democracy, domestic responsibilities, work stress, etc.), creating a meditative state. I recently read a great article on finding flow, and how it’s not just reserved for great artists and athletes. I do believe I’ve gotten to a place of being able to lose myself to sport because of the hours of sheer repetition that have enabled building enough muscle memory, so that instinct and intention become pleasantly blurred.

David Foster Wallace once wrote, “Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution.” Anyone who plays will convey something similar—that it takes a very particular combination of endurance, spatial intelligence, mental fortitude, and endless problem solving to play this four dimensional physical chess. This, of course, doesn’t even include the fun of spectating, the on-court and off-court style elements, the spectacle that is grand slams, and the way the sport can be played by children and nonagenarians alike, all of which contribute to making it quite unique.

Here’s some of my favorite gear, my racquet pick, and some enjoyable tennis media for getting into a tennis-based lifestyle.