Tennis is the best medicine

Afraid it's more blogging on my own tennis - sorry, I can't help myself!

I had one of my sweetest victories today. The standard of tennis wasn't good as it has been in recent weeks, but the bottomline was I won in difficult circumstances.

I was playing my personal Nadal - the hitting pro from the local indoor place. As ever we kept it to just an hour.

He must win 8 out of every 10 games we play. And today I was feeling lousy (I've not had enough sleep this past week and today it felt like I was coming down with a bug. No energy and felt spaced all day.)

But I went ahead with the tennis on the basis that it would be kill or cure, with the smart money being on the former rather than the latter.

Despite having a cracking headache i got off to a good start holding serve, breaking, and holding to go 3 - 0 up. My opponent then held and broke back to close the gap to 3 - 2, but I then won the next 2 games to go to 5 - 2.

He was serving to stay in the match and I somehow squandered 3 matchpoints before he closed it out and then broke me to bring the score to 5 - 4.

I was feeling terrible and at the back of mind I couldn't help but think that if it went to 5 all I would struggle to stay in the match. So I stepped it up and hit two big returns from the ad court to tee up two break points, and clinched the match on the the second with a fierce backhand approach shot from which he netted the volley.

I came off court with a headache but also feeling pumped, and when I got home I felt so much better. Proof that tennis really is the best medicine.