Monday I played tennis on two hours of sleep.
My dog Brutus — 12 years old — had been up every 30 minutes the night before with GI issues bad enough to scare me. Tremors. The kind of night where you’re Googling things you don’t want to Google. He pulled through. I didn’t sleep.
So I showed up to the court at a 2.0 on a 10-point energy scale. Barely functional. And somehow I got to 5-3 in the first set, serving for it, up 40-30.
Mid-rally, I hear the pop. A string snapped. Not after the point. Mid-rally. I lose the point. Switch racquets between games — old backup, different tension, different feel — and watch the lead evaporate while I readjust.
My opponent served for the set at 6-5. I broke him. Forced a tiebreaker. He double-faulted twice when I had set point. I went big on my serve. Missed return. Set.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: I didn’t get a timeout.
There was no pause while I figured it out. Life kept moving, the score kept moving, and I had to move with it — with broken equipment, on broken sleep, mid-point.
That’s what cancer taught me first. You don’t get a reset. You get a diagnosis mid-rally. The equipment you thought you had — your health, your timeline, your assumptions about how your story goes — it snaps. And the score keeps ticking.
What you do in those next few points tells you everything about who you actually are.
I’m not talking about being superhuman. I’m talking about something more basic than that.
I’m talking about the decision — in the moment when everything is wrong — to keep playing anyway. Not perfectly. Not confidently. Just: keep playing.
On two hours of sleep with a backup racquet I hadn’t warmed up, I won the set. Not because I had some reserve of extraordinary energy. Because I didn’t stop.
The strings break. The sleep disappears. The equipment fails. The diagnosis arrives. The relationship ends. The plan stops working.
None of those things are actually the moment that defines you.
The next point is.
I’ve had a lot of broken-string moments over the last several years. Some were bigger than a tennis match — a lot bigger. The body failing in ways I didn’t expect. Systems collapsing. People leaving. Plans that couldn’t survive contact with reality.
What I know now is that the switch to the backup racquet is never as smooth as you want it to be. There’s always an adjustment period. A few points where nothing feels right.
You stay in it anyway.
Not because you know it’ll work out. Because giving up in that moment guarantees it won’t.
Brutus is fine, by the way. He was barking at nothing by Tuesday afternoon — which, if you know Brutus, is a full recovery.
I was back on the court. The backup racquet got restrung. And I started tracking my energy on a 1-10 scale every morning so I could stop being surprised by what 2.0 days feel like and start making better decisions about how to use what I have.
Systems. Even for broken-string days.
Whatever mid-point you’re in right now — keep playing.
Just. Keep. Moving.