I just played the best three hours of table ten­nis in my life. Pat and I head­ed to the games room on cam­pus, and had three match­es to the best of 19, a total of 43 games. Every sin­gle mus­cle in my body is com­plete­ly exhaust­ed. The worst are the soles of my feet, which are more sore than when I stood for five hours at the Strung Out con­cert.

We’d been plan­ning to play for more than three months now, and I haven’t been able to stop think­ing about it for a while. All week, I had been try­ing to devel­op some strat­e­gy to beat him, but could­n’t come up with a sin­gle idea since he plays with a strong back­hand with a pen-grip. I decid­ed to sim­ply play more aggres­sive­ly than him, and fig­ure out his weak­ness on the fly. In the end, I just ran him around a lot, putting the ball on alter­nat­ing cor­ners or at an angle he did­n’t expect. I can serve con­sis­tent­ly now, and have got­ten much bet­ter at con­trol­ling how long or short they are.

Almost none of his pre­vi­ous strate­gies worked on me. His quick serves to my right don’t do much any­more because I’ve been suc­cess­ful in bal­anc­ing out my posi­tion at the table. His down­spins don’t work any­more because the peo­ple at the club real­ly make me work on my chops and my push­es. His ral­ly hits to my left don’t work any­more because I’ve been improv­ing my back­hand for the last two weeks. My short game has become as good as his. The only thing he could do was serve a down­spin to my left to force a weak return, which is some­thing he fig­ured out rather quick­ly.

I end­ed up win­ning all the match­es, 10–5, 10–3, 10–5, but both of us agreed that they were the finest we’ve ever played. It was three hours of pure inten­si­ty, not only phys­i­cal­ly but men­tal­ly as well. Concentrating on the serve, the strat­e­gy, try­ing to fig­ure out a weak­ness, adapt­ing to an oppo­nents, keep­ing track of the ball, I was ready to col­lapse when I got home.