Getting a Grip Read online

  “Monica, there is finally someone who is louder than you are! Maria grunts as loud as a small aircraft taking off!” Really? I had no idea. I hadn’t noticed that she’d made a peep. I must have selective hearing when I’m playing, because I am completely oblivious to grunts.

  I won in the final against Chanda Rubin and got ready to head Down Under for the Australian Open. The first match was easy as I cruised to a 6-0, 6-1 victory. I was all set for my next match against Klara Koukalova, a Czech player who was in insane shape. She ran down every ball, so it was impossible to get anything past her. I was going to have to bear down and get my legs moving. She hit a crosscourt zinger to my backhand, and as I was lunging to get it I twisted my ankle. I knew right away it was a sprain. Crap! I couldn’t believe what had just happened. And on what had become like a home court to me. Melbourne’s hard courts were unforgiving and notorious for being the cause of many an injured ankle during the tournament, but it had never, ever happened to me. I taped it up and did my best to make it through the rest of the match, but I ended up losing.

  The medical staff in Melbourne is fantastic, so I stayed to get some treatment after being knocked out. For two weeks I put my ankle through a rigorous healing regimen and was in good enough playing shape to take on a chaotic four-week itinerary of Tokyo-Qatar-Dubai. In between packing, getting on planes, checking into hotels, unpacking, and finding restaurants willing to prepare chicken with no oil, I fit in as many hours of laser therapy on my ankle as possible. I held my own and made it to the finals twice, but the precarious state of my injury prevented me from doing any training off the court. My weight crept up and up. While the hotel room scales registered my weight at 168, I knew I was at least a few pounds heavier. One thing I learned over all the years of traveling was that hotel scales are never right. If they were, nobody would raid the minibar and order room service late at night!

  Dubai was trying to promote the tournament, so they planned nonstop fun events for the players. I went four-wheel off-roading in the desert with Lindsay and Maria and taped up my ankle to play a promotional match on the roof of the only six-star hotel in the world. Everything in the hotel was gold, including the helicopter landing strip, which had been transformed into a temporary tennis court. While I took resting my foot very seriously when it came to off-court training, I wasn’t about to let it interfere with doing cool things like that.

  It wasn’t a smart move. The stress from the ankle sprain woke up my dormant stress fracture. It came back stronger than ever, and by the time I got to Rome, I couldn’t put an ounce of pressure on it. After years of refusing to take any painkillers or supplements, I gave in to the tournament doctors’ advice and started taking Vioxx to get through the matches. It wasn’t long before Vioxx became a staple in my diet. I knew precisely how much I needed to take and when to take it before I had to step onto the court. But not even Vioxx was strong enough to get me past the second round. I had to retire in the second set to Nadia Petrova, who beat me two weeks later in the first round of the French Open.

  It was time to go home.

  41

  Where Is the Panic Button?

  Your sesamoid bone has been shattered into pieces.” I was at my orthopedic surgeon’s office in Denver. I’d seen a dozen doctors in Europe and had received just as many medical opinions and treatment options. I wanted to go to someone who’d successfully seen me through an injury before.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you have to take six months off.” Six months? That would mean missing Wimbleton and the U.S. Open, too. That would mean missing the rest of the season. And by the time I could play again I’d almost be thirty. THIRTY. I saw that number spelled out in capital letters, just like that. In tennis, it was known as “dirty thirty.” In terms of fitness, recovery time, endorsements—everything, really—it meant the end was near. This wasn’t good. Maybe I didn’t really need this bone. Maybe we could just pin it together in the interim, tape up my foot, throw a bottle of Vioxx down my throat, and get back on the tour.

  “Okay, and how liberal is your definition of ‘six months’?” I asked, making air quotes. The doctor raised his eyebrows. He meant business.

  “My definition of ‘six months’ is six months. I’m not kidding: There’s no wiggle room here. Your bone is destroyed and we’ll have to put you in a cast for at least a few months. If you don’t take care of this, it will keep getting worse until your tendons are so shot, you can’t move your foot at all.”

  “What kind of therapy can I do to speed up the healing?” If it was a matter of hard work, I could take it on.

  “There isn’t any,” he answered. “At least not yet. Other than icing and light massaging, the best thing you can do is to just leave it alone. It needs rest—nothing else.”

  Well, that’s that, I thought. Six months of not doing anything. Just wire my mouth shut right now. I’d be a blimp by the end of the year, guaranteed. I held off on the cast and got some more opinions. I got through each day by getting cortisone shots and downing painkillers. But it didn’t matter how many doctors I went to: each prognosis held varying degrees of disappointment. No matter how I sliced it, I was going to have to take a lot of time off. The same panic that struck me at the start of 2000 when I was laid up at home reading letters about how appealingly husky I’d become hit me again. But this time it was worse: I was older. Time was running out. Even if I came back at thirty, I’d only have one or two years—max—left in me. And I couldn’t even think about my weight. To my dismay, the breakup with Benjamin had not plunged me into the “heartbreak diet.” I was still wearing my size fourteens and I didn’t have anything bigger in my closet. Surely if I weighed that much while I was working out, I’d inevitably pork up while I was sitting on my butt at home. I knew that wiring my jaw shut wasn’t an option, so I started reading (again) every nutritional book on my shelf. How many calories should I consume daily? How many net carbs are acceptable? What is a net carb? Should I let my body fast for twelve full hours every night? How did normal people eat? What did they eat? When did they eat it? I was overwhelmed with the simple task of implementing a “normal” diet.

  So I didn’t. For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t plan any meals. I didn’t have a nutritionist or coach or trainer. I decided to wing it. It was scary, but I didn’t know what else to do. I was tired and sore. I was sick of working hard and not seeing any results. I just needed to decompress for a while.

  The first couple of months went by quickly. I hung out with my mom, cleaned the house, and read a lot of books. Of course, I had my share of freakouts. Should I have this ice cream bar for dessert? I didn’t expend a single calorie in any cardio activity: Do I deserve to have it? Sometimes the answer was yes and sometimes it was no. But something groundbreaking was beginning to happen. If I did eat the ice cream bar, it wouldn’t launch me into an all-out feeding frenzy. I’d eat it, then go in the other room and start doing something else. I didn’t even notice the change until one night when I was out to dinner with my mom and the waitress came by to clear our plates.

  “Can I get you ladies some dessert?” she asked. My mom ordered a scoop of ice cream and waited for me to order. The waitress stood there looking at me, ready to write down my dessert.

  “Actually, I’m all set. I’m not having any, thank you.” The waitress walked off but my mom was still looking at me.

  “Really?” she asked. “You don’t want anything?”

  “No, I’m fine. Dinner was great and now I’m full.”

  “Are you on another diet?” she asked worriedly. After all, why else would I pass on dessert, my favorite meal of the day?

  “No, Mom, really. I’m just not hungry.” As the words came out of my mouth, I realized how rarely I’d ever said them and really meant them.

  My anticipated freakout over the forced layoff had produced the opposite effect. Left to my own devices and free from the judging of my food babysitters, I felt calmer than I had in years. But
there was another panic-inducing event just around the corner: the big THREE-OH birthday. When I was a little girl, thirty sounded so old. And so far away. Parents were thirty, and who among us ever thought we’d be that old? But thirty came racing up to hit me smack in the face. After the French Open loss in May, I’d stayed far away from the tennis world, spending most of my time at home or at the physiotherapist’s office, getting massage and ice therapy. But in August I was stir-crazy and decided to run up to New York to check out the U.S. Open. I met up with Caitlin and Melissa, two friends I hadn’t seen since the spring.

  “Monica, did you lose weight?” Caitlin asked.

  “Ha!” I laughed out loud. “No way. I haven’t done a thing in two months. I feel like a whale.”

  “You’ve lost weight. You definitely look a little different,” Melissa agreed. They started circling me like sharks, eyeing me up and down, convinced that I was keeping a secret from them.

  “Honestly, I haven’t. There’s just no way.”

  They both shrugged their shoulders. “Okay then, but whatever you’re ‘not’ doing, keep ‘not’ doing it. It’s working for you,” Caitlin said.

  They looked skeptical. I’d made a point of not weighing myself during my time off but I knew what I weighed when I’d gotten back from France in June: 173. I had been terrified to step back on the scale since. But my friends were so emphatic that I looked different, I decided to weigh myself when I got back to Florida. Don’t freak out, don’t freak out, I thought as the red 00 digits blinked an interminable three times as they calculated my weight. The number 165 glowed up at me. One hundred and sixty-five! How did that happen? An eight-pound loss was what I used to shoot for during my two-week-starvation/seven-hour-workouts-a-day phases. If I could drop eight pounds at the end of one of those, I was rejoicing in the street over my success, and here I’d gone and done it without even trying. It didn’t make any sense at all, but I wasn’t about to start complaining.

  Throughout the fall I did more of the same: reading, hanging out with my dog, and going to daily therapy sessions. But December 2, my birthday, was looming on the calendar like a dreaded final exam. I was also getting closer to the six-month mark but my foot wasn’t healing as fast as the doctors had hoped. Surgery was an option, but the probability of it working was only 50 percent. I was still on a mission to get back on the tour, but more and more I was beginning to think about what I would do with my life after tennis. However, when these thoughts intruded, they weren’t shrouded in depression and confusion as they had been after my stabbing. Instead, I felt more intent on finding some real answers. A few days before my big birthday, I decided I wanted to spend it by myself. I found a room at a small eco-lodge in Costa Rica and booked a plane ticket.

  “How much longer did you say?” I ducked my head for the tenth time to avoid hitting the roof of the Jeep as we bounced over the rock-strewn dirt path. Actually, the “rocks” were more like boulders and the “road” was more like a rugged mountain bike trail. We’d been on the road for three hours.

  “We are there soon!” the driver cheerily yelled over the noise of the diesel engine. “Soon” ended up being another hour, but as soon as I got my aching backside out of the Jeep, I knew the ride had been worth it. A handful of thatched cottages lined a beautiful white beach. Thick treetop canopies stretched back as far as I could see. When I checked in I was told there was no TV, phone, or electricity—basically no contact with the outside world—and would I be okay with that? Okay? It sounded perfect! I followed a trail through the trees and found my cottage. It had bamboo floors, a bed with pristine white sheets and a fluffy comforter at its foot, a reading chair, and a 180-degree view of blue water. The whole week was like a meditation. I rarely spotted other people and spent more time talking to the frogs and birds I saw on my hikes through the rain forest. Turtles were the only sign of life on the beach, so I tossed my sarong off, not caring whether the sea creatures thought my butt looked big. It was liberating. I walked along the shore during the incoming tide and felt, for a moment, a connection to my body I hadn’t felt for years.

  Without an agenda or a physical therapy appointment to get to, I settled into a natural rhythm of waking with the sun and going to sleep when it disappeared. Two days into my stay, I was walking along the beach at sunrise when I saw two women stretching on the hard-packed sand. I hadn’t seen anyone in twenty-four hours so I was curious. I walked closer and one of them said, “Do you want to join us?” She had wild, curly hair thrown into a topknot and a warm smile. If they were getting ready to go for a run, I wasn’t interested.

  “What are you doing?” I needed to make sure I knew what I was getting into before I committed.

  “Yoga. It’s great to do when the sun is coming up.”

  I’d never done yoga in my life. Hamstring stretches were my arch nemesis: I used to drive my dad crazy when I complained about them during our track workouts. I never wanted to warm them up; I just wanted to jump right in and go at full speed. But this week was all about opening my mind, so—quite uncharacteristically for me—I said yes.

  The woman with the topknot led us through sun salutations and all sorts of poses with names I couldn’t pronounce. I spent a lot of time watching her to see what she was doing, and was amazed at how easy she made it look. My new yoga teacher was so graceful and peaceful as she flowed from one pose into the next. I was liking it more than I thought I would, and my foot felt fine. At the end of the impromptu class, we sat in the lotus position as she talked about peace, love, harmony, and all the other things I always assumed yogis were into. Then she said something that resonated with me.

  “Feel the power that you just received from this morning’s practice throughout your entire body.” She breathed deeply. “Direct all of that energy into your core—who you are on the deepest of levels.” I’d always thought my core was my abs and lower back. This was new information. “That is where the energy belongs. With a strong core, you will be like an old tree that is the tallest and strongest in the forest. Nothing will be able to shake you or throw you off of your path. With a strong core, you are you.” That sounded appealing.

  I spent most of my thirtieth birthday challenging myself to do something new: I was going to just relax. I threw myself into a hammock to read and nap. I wasn’t going to feel guilty about relaxing. I was just going to be.

  The first hour was trying. I got antsy and thought about going on a hike. Or a swim. No, Monica, you are staying right here. By the second hour I had calmed down enough to read a few chapters of my book. By late morning I was digging the hammock life and realized I hadn’t turned a page in half an hour. My mind started to drift off. The stress was evaporating. I had no timetable for getting back to tennis. If this fracture wasn’t a career ender, then it was going to keep me out of the game for at least another couple of months. There was no point in freaking out about it: I couldn’t speed up the healing process, so I just had to relax. I had no coaches, trainers, or nutritionists on the payroll and it was a relief. I felt like I was doing a major spring cleaning after letting fifteen years of clutter build up. That night I celebrated my birthday with a platter of fresh fruit and a sunset walk on the beach.

  Being thirty wasn’t so bad.

  42

  Worth a Thousand Words

  Wait a minute, are you sure this thing weighs ten pounds?” The wetsuit was hindering my normal range of motion and I was struggling to fasten the heavy belt around my waist.

  My friend Annabelle, a fitness buff, laughed. “Yes, I swear, it’s ten pounds.”

  Annabelle and I were in the Bahamas for a girls’ weekend. I’d barely finished unpacking from my Costa Rica trip when she’d called me with the idea. My first instinct was to say no. Two vacations in a row? I’d never done that before. In between tournaments and working out, I rarely had time to take even one vacation. Before Costa Rica, the last one I’d taken was when I’d gone to the Caribbean after Astro died. Seven years had gone by since then.

&
nbsp; “Come on,” Annabelle pleaded. “What else are you going to do—stare at your foot?”

  She was right. I’d just finished another round of therapy and all I could do was wait for my injury to finish healing. This time the best thing I could do was to just do nothing. “Okay,” I told her. “Why not?”

  So there we were, standing on the platform of a dive boat as I was trying to attach a heavy weight belt around my midsection. “No way.” I shook my head. “There is no way this is ten pounds.” I turned to our dive master. “Are you sure this is ten pounds?”

  “Yep, absolutely sure,” he answered. “Ten pounds. And make sure it’s on tight. If it falls off, you’ll never sink beneath the water.”

  I was flabbergasted. I’d lugged ten- and twenty-pound dumbbells all over the gym for years, but I’d never taped one onto my stomach before. It was so burdensome, I was waddling around on the boat deck like an arthritic duck. Then a light went on in my head: this was how much I’d been carrying around for eight years, multiplied by three—and sometimes four. No wonder my feet hurt and my lateral movement had suffered so much! I knew I needed to lose weight, but this was a whole new perspective. I didn’t need to lose it so I’d look good in a bikini; I needed to lose it to give my body a break.

  When I got back to the hotel room, I made a decision. I was sick of lugging weight belts of fat around. I was going to drop them for good, but this time I’d do it differently. Nobody was going to take care of me and my problems. Nobody on the outside could fix what was going on inside of me. I was the only one who could and would do it.