The Other Side of Tired

Here's the Cliffs Notes version of the blog post I want to write today:

Remember how I briefly mentioned the Australian Open final yesterday?  Did you watch it?  What can anyone say about it, except that it was literally unbelievable?  That it made me proud to be a tennis fan?  That it made me marvel, yet again, at what the human mind and human body are capable of accomplishing?  Here's what Andy Roddick said about it:

Last week, I mentioned that one of the mantras I repeat in my head is That's where you are going to know yourself.  On the other side of tired.  As I wrote a couple years ago, it comes from Andre Agassi's autobiography, Open.  He told his trainer, Gil Reyes, that chasing dreams is so tiring, and that was Gil's response.  Yesterday, we got a new tennis image of what that kind of self-knowing tiredness looks like:

image via

I was cheering for Djokovic to win.  I used to like him because he was the underdog compared to Nadal and Federer, and I'm amazed by how he has managed to completely usurp them in the past year+.  I was also cheering for him to win because he had to serve second in the fifth set, which is a huge disadvantage.  If Nadal had broken Djokovic, the match would have been over.  When Djokovic broke Nadal, he still had to win his service game to win the match, which meant Nadal had a chance to even the score.  You might recall that when Federer beat Roddick in the 2009 Wimbledon final, Federer got to serve first, which meant that when he broke Roddick for the first time in the entire match, it was game-set-match-championship to Federer.  No chance for Roddick to break back.

Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked, and Nora is going to wake up soon.  And if she doesn't, I should spend the next 30 minutes reading.  So what I really want to say is this: when Rafa and Nole were standing there during the trophy presentation, you couldn't tell who had won and who had lost.  All you could tell was that both players had given everything they had.  Even though they had just been executing unbelievable athleticism a few minutes ago, and someone was about to hand them each a huge check and a trophy or a dish, they were so exhausted that they could not even stand.  I watched that whole trophy presentation, waiting for Djokovic to raise the trophy above his head, as is customary.  He couldn't do it.  In other sports, they talk about "leaving it all out on the field."  I've never seen a better demonstration of that cliche.  Djokovic used to have a bad reputation on the tour for being unfit, for calling the trainer to give himself a break, and for retiring from matches when he should have played them out.  I think he found himself on the other side of tired.

So I'm going to try to imagine this image every time I start to feel tired or exhausted over the next few weeks.  We'll see how that works out.