(by Sally Moyland)
After my knee surgery in December 2023, I worked up the fastest recovery that I could to participate in the US Olympic Team Trials at the end of March. Kind of strange to say this, but that was probably the hardest I have ever worked in the seventeen years of my time on earth. All that effort was just to give myself a chance at becoming a 2024 Olympian. Although settling for first alternate was the harsh reality, it was still an unbelievable achievement. Despite the slight feeling of defeat, I still saw the shining star of hope and held my head high.
After the Olympic Trials, my mom and I flew back to Taiwan and I trained there for about a month. On the physical side, I kept working on my daily rehab and did targeted exercises to strengthen my quads. I didn’t quite get into the endurance part, as the one time I did try to run, I only got 300 meters out before my knee told me to stop. Still, I tried to get in my cardio by doing some jump rope. On the table tennis side, I worked on advancing my skill set and adjusting my play style. One month was shorter than it seemed and before I knew it, May was around the corner. Competition wise, I’ve decided to take this year slower than the last. However, having some tournaments planned out was still very much needed. For the more obvious reasons, my ranking would drop to nothing if I didn’t do anything for a year and I wouldn’t be able to checkpoint my progress and see if my training was actually doing me any good. Also, it is easy to lose the “feeling for competition” if you don’t get back to it from time to time. For the less obvious reason, if there were no competitions for me to look forward to, it’s awfully hard to stay motivated and focused for long. The repetitive training days will get the better of you.
Anyway, back to the start of May. Since I was in Taiwan, I chose to go somewhere close, whatever the difficulty level of the competition might be. Korea happened to be just next door, so it was “The Chosen One”. I knew before the tournament that I was still not back at my peak performance. However, I did feel like the adjustments and work that I put in during the past month were quite mature…..Definitely, definitely wrong about that.
I was looking forward to going to Korea. I hadn’t been there before, but I figured that maybe Japan and Korea were similar. And Japan was my favorite place so I must enjoy Korea as well. Wrong about that, too. Our first encounter with the locals was quite exciting, in a negative way I should say. We needed a big taxi. It took a few tries, but we finally found one. We tried to get ourselves and the luggage in the car… but ended up getting yelled at by the driver. Korean cars are slightly different in some ways. Firstly, the trunks seemed to be automatic on most of them. Now, maybe you’re thinking, “What?! How is that special?” Well, that’s cause my family has got a nice, cheap, and perfectly functional car with a MANUAL trunk, so little me here wasn’t used to it. That was the first thing I got yelled at for. (The driver was shouting in Korean so I didn’t know what he was saying, but for sure he was mad) Secondly, when I tried to close the car door, I couldn’t find the dang handle. Maybe you can relate if you don’t own a Tesla and you tried to get into your friend’s Tesla for the first time and just couldn’t understand how to open the door. That was kind of how I felt, but on the inside of the car.
The hotel we stayed at wasn’t too far out from the competition hall. On the way to our room, I noticed a couple of special things. Firstly, it was a beach hotel. Is that what you call it – a “beach hotel”? Anyway, it was next to a nice big beach. I’m sure that’s one of the bigger attractions, cause we were out in nowhere. For sure it didn’t give any big city vibes. The second special thing was that it was a pet friendly hotel. And, oh my my, do Koreans love their fur babies. There was one in every direction I glanced and every elevator I took. However, not once did I see a cat. Speaking of the hotel, yes, it was a nice hotel. The hotel rooms were definitely comfortably large enough. That’s probably one of the things they beat Japan on. I still remember one time in Japan where we had a four person bedroom. Once we opened the luggage in the room, there was no floor left to be seen.
Since we didn’t buy the WTT package, we didn’t get food or transport accommodations. We had to use taxis and figure out what to eat. The trouble was somewhat a good thing I guess. Since EVERYTHING, and I mean everything in Korea was spicy. I could probably find spicy ice cream if I tried. My spice tolerance is so low I won’t even take mustard, so since the WTT accommodation food was lots of spicy stuff, I guess I was kind of lucky we didn’t go down that path.
Upon the second day of arrival, my competition started. I won all five matches on the first day and continued fighting hard in the next couple days of competition. But, ultimately, only made it to the quarterfinals in the U17 event and the round of 16 in the U19 event. I lost to two Chinese Taipei players. I took a quick 0:3 loss in the U17 event. And a nail-biting 2:3 loss in the U19 event. I had won the first game with little setback, yet losing my consistency, I dropped the next two and found myself 6:9 down in the fourth. I chose to take a timeout and regather myself. I was on the verge of breakdown as I felt I had no way to solve any problems. After resetting for a quick bit, I was back out and came back to bring on a fifth game. I started off the last game with a strong 3:0 lead, forcing my opponent to use her timeout as well. She seemed to be exactly where I was a few minutes ago, feeling much despair. However, she still came back strong and we were point for point. Towards the endgame, I managed to pull two points ahead but was unable to finish off the match. I took a hard loss in the last game with just a two point margin at 9:11. That was more devastating for me than I expected it to be.
I had beaten both of the Chinese Taipei players I encountered multiple times just a few years back. I had a sudden realization of the hard reality that I hadn’t really improved much from the Sally I was before surgery. It felt as if I had been working and pushing with all my might in soggy, knee-deep mud, yet others were striding comfortably and zipping past me on a nice, tamed, and obstacle free track (of course that isn’t true and everyone at this level works extremely hard. That’s just how I FELT).
Before the tournament I seemed to be quite open-minded and not too worried if I lost. I thought I had it under control – the desire to win. Before my surgery, I was a pretty confident athlete with a considerably strong mentality. Although I didn’t want to admit it, I could see that my mental aspect had definitely taken a strong hit from the degraded performances and results.
To be honest, if you look at my progress as an outsider (even my parents included), there has been nothing other than overachieving in the past six months. So, it’s been difficult for me to find a sounding board which wouldn’t think I was just complaining. I was in an absurdly difficult spot really trying to help myself adjust to more realistic expectations. For a person like me, that’s easier said than done…
Don’t miss the (second) 2 PART of this fascinating story…
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