Competing for competing
While riding my charging station bicycle at Schipol International Airport, my mind starts to wonder into how the power is generated with electromagnetism and in what way my chocolate waffle calories are transformed in to a current of electrons flowing in to my iPad. I go all the way back to University. Sitting countless hours in old class rooms and being able to solve equations I can’t even read anymore. Why would one throw all that hard work away just to hit a green squishy hairy ball from one side of the court to the other.
“Life is like a video game”, said my co-worker when I told him I quit my job. “The graphics are awesome and the storyline is great, but you cannot save, pause and start over if you didn’t like the path you took.” I don’t know if I made the right choice, but I’d rather attempt to do something great and fail than to attempt to do nothing and succeed. That attempt brought me to Rotterdam to compete.
Getting back to my bicycle, (which by the way is a scam just to get your butt moving, since this piece of an Apple is not charging), it was a tough trip to start this career. To save time, I will describe my trip in a very efficient engineer-friendly way:
- Buy flights and hotels even if you don’t know when the tournament will take place because the federation (FIP) is not being run exactly the German way.
- Get your ass to Rotterdam and walking in rain for 30 min since there was no public transport.
- Find the club which was amazingly located in a peak on a lake in one of the windiest countries.
- They don’t like Visa in this country so find someone to make a bank transfer and give you cash to pay for the tournament and food
- Match is late 2 hours
- Get your ass kicked in less than an hour 6-1, 6-1.
- Go home…wait… Train driver strike… no public transport to Amsterdam
- Organise a car ride from a friend of friend
- Get finally to Schipol Airport where is a chaos and people missed their flights because of the queues.
- Arrive home, start again!
Back to engineering. They say there are no limits to the smartness in human brain. But the thing why we lose to computers is that a computer is willing to make one million errors until it finds the solution. Not many humans are. As one of the greatest inventors of our time and the father to electrical power generation, Thomas Edison said: “I have not failed 10 000 times—I’ve successfully found 10 000 ways that will not work.”. As in padel and sports generally, most of the athletes have more losses than wins. So time to pick up the racket, 10 000 times if needed.
I welcome you to follow our journey as someone’s following their dreams. This will be a blog about a life of athletes, coaches, academy and what happens in the world of padel and how we see it. We write the ugly truth with a tablespoon of sarcasm and good vibes. Enjoy, give feedback and find us @tastyplayhard.