The One with the Tennis Volleys

Tennis. 

Oh, tennis. 

The sport that always looked so appealing.

That I would love to play.

But the same sport at which I could never seem to be even remotely adept.

I'm not exaggerating, here, people, I stttttunk. 

The only redeeming aspect about the whole tennis aspirations thing is that my husband was just about as terrible as I was. 

I know that sounds horrible to say, but he'd say the same thing. 

The reason this made me feel "better"?

--normally he's way awesome at whatever activity I'm attempting to master.

Meaning if I don't catch on quickly, I get super self-conscious and way too frustrated with myself--

thinking he's hating every minute of my lameness.

Really, that's not true. 

But that's just the way I feel, ok?

We couldn't get a simple volley going for the lives of us. 

And we didn't try just once.

Nope, we've tried summer after summer. 

But we always give up because it's been frustrating and not fun in the least. 

Given our equally competitive personalities, royally stinking at an activity is not really high on our wish list. 

This summer we were dreaming of spending hours on the tennis courts.

Working up a sweat, having fun, bonding.

You know, all the good stuff.

We were "conditioning" all winter long.

Playing ping pong in our basement. 

Even when I didn't want to play pingpong because I stunk at that too.

But who knew?!

Practice really does make perfect less awful!

And in some strange, larger than life way, the lessons I learned on the ping pong courts

have translated at least in part to the tennis courts.

This afternoon we laced our shoes, 

tied back our hair (ok, so that was just me.), 

grabbed our rackets and a couple of terrible tennis balls, 

and gave it the ol' college try.

Sure enough, we had definitely improved.

Now, we're still no Venus Williams or John McEnroe, but at least we volleyed.

Quite a few times. 

We played for an hour and had a blast. 

I was huffing and puffing and sweating (mostly due to the 85 degree temps)

and I'd call that a win. 

Go us!