I was serving for the set. 5-3, 40-30. Match point territory. The kind of moment you’ve been building toward for the whole match.
Mid-rally, my strings broke.
Not at the end of the point. Not between games. Mid-rally. The shot died. I lost the point. And I had to walk to my bag, pull out my backup racquet, and figure out how to win the next several games with a frame I hadn’t touched all match.
I lost a couple games in a row adjusting. He got back in it. The set I was about to close got complicated.
Here’s the thing about broken strings: they don’t care about the moment you’re in. They don’t care that you were about to close out a set. They don’t care that you’ve been playing well all match, that the momentum was yours, that you had a clear path to winning.
Neither does cancer.
Neither does a job loss. Or a relationship ending at the worst time. Or any of the other things that have a way of breaking exactly when you need them to hold.
The equipment fails when it fails. What matters is what you do next.
I didn’t panic. I didn’t make excuses to myself or anyone else. I picked up the backup racquet, got back to the baseline, and found a way to keep competing.
Not elegantly. It took a few games to re-calibrate. There was definitely a period where I was fighting the racquet as much as my opponent. But I stayed in it. I kept finding the next point. I forced a tiebreaker.
The set didn’t close the way I’d planned. But it didn’t end the way it threatened to either.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between preparation and adaptability.
Preparation is everything. You show up ready. You have your equipment dialed in. You’ve done the work. You know your game plan.
But preparation can’t account for mid-rally string breaks. It can’t account for what happens when the thing you were counting on stops working without warning.
Adaptability is what you do after. It’s the ability to look at what you have left — the backup racquet, the diminished options, the unexpected circumstances — and still find a way to compete.
That’s not something you plan for. That’s something you build.
When I was going through treatment, I had a plan. Doctors, schedules, protocols. Everything mapped out as well as it could be.
And then something would change. A complication. An unexpected result. A setback that didn’t fit the plan.
Every time that happened, I had to pick up the backup racquet. Keep playing with what I had. Stay in the match.
I’m still here because of adaptability more than preparation.
The strings are going to break. Not always at a convenient time. Usually at the worst one.
The question isn’t whether you can prevent it. The question is whether you’ve built the kind of person who can pick up whatever’s left and keep going.
Build that person. That’s the whole preparation.
Just. Keep. Moving.