A (160:42)
Yep. So 2012, I. 2011 was my best year. 2012, like I remember I finished the year 2011 on Thanksgiving. We played the World Tour Finals was at the O2 in London. So, you know, not a Thanksgiving holiday over there. But so I, I played Roger in the, my Last match there on Thanksgiving, went home. That was a th. That was a Thursday, obviously. Went home the next day, started training again Monday for the next year. So like I had already. What I wish I could have done and what I wish a lot of like athletes do is not be satisfied with your results, but, but be open to celebrating Good, right? Like just like be, be okay with taking an extra day or two to appreciate what you had just done that year. I wish I had taken that whole week off and started the next Monday or even two weeks after that. Jim Courier was one of the, one of the, all time, like animal fitness guys. He, after every year, he put his rackets down for two weeks, didn't touch anything, didn't do anything for two straight weeks. And he was like, he was like the sort of the ultimate like fitness guy or whatever. He changed the game. Literally changed the game. So I started training like right away. I had, I had something called tachycardia, which was, which is a electrical issue in your heart that sort of manifests through stress, caffeine, alcohol, like, stuff like that. If you have this, this sort of issue, it's not a life or death thing. It's sort of like afib for some people that have heard of that at fibrillation, sort of of your. Where your heart, the, the electric, the electricity in your heart is like the quarterback and it, when it fires, it tells your heart to beat. So like fire up a boat. Fire some of them and there's thousands of them. Some of them can fire uncontrollably and like malfunction. And so they just fire like uncontrollably. And so your heart doesn't know but to beat because it's like, oh, it's firing. So I should beat. And so your heart is beating. I trained, really, I trained with a heart rate monitor on whenever I was, would when I, whenever I would practice because I wanted to know in tennis we only get 25 seconds between each point. How could I get my heart rate as high as I could possibly get it to? And then how. And then I have 25 seconds to do these breathing techniques and all this stuff. So I'd train like crazy. I'd stop for 25 seconds, I'd do these breathing and then I'd start again and I'd do it over and over and over again. I couldn't get my heart rate above 192, 192 beats per minute on my own. When these, when these episodes would happen, they would come out of nowhere, usually at night. Honestly, they would, I'd wake up in the middle of night. My heart was beating, and it was beating at like 220, 230 beats, and which is like, I mean, like, I felt like my, my, Because I didn't know anything about the heart, anything really about that area. And like, I thought, could it explode? Does it blow up? Whatever? And so your mind starts racing. You go into a panic attack as well as, and those are, those are brutal little. So I, I, I developed this tachycardia. I had a procedure, a heart procedure called an ablation, where they go through the, your groin, the main vein, and they go up and they basically recreate the bad. You know, recreate the tachycardia and kill the bad ones, the, the dead one, you know, and just deaden them. They either freeze them or, or singe them off with heat. Very success. Like, there's probably an 80% success rate with guys I've know a few people that have tried, have had to do it. Tw most part, it's, you get it, you get it done, and it never happens again. I had that happen. It never, I got it done. It never happened since then. This was during, like, May. I'm still, and mind you, I'm still like, the number one American. And that was a big thing because Andy Roddick was number one American for our, in our generation for a long time. And it was my first time sort of overtaking him, getting into the top 10 in the world the year prior. So I was still, like, in the top 10, top eight in the world or whatever. Still the number one top American in the world. And I had to pull out of the French Open to do that, which was fine. I was not very good on clay. And start the grass. Grass was my best surface. I'd go over there, and I went over to Wimbledon, and my dad, my father had, like, an issue where he had, he had to have a pacemaker put in. I was like, dad, have you, have you had any of these, like, sort of where you think it's gonna happen again or, like, I didn't even know what the thoughts were. They were just. Because you don't know anything about. Yeah, you're just, like, you're always, like, on edge that something bad is gonna happen. Right. Anxiety, like, your mind. My mind was way down here and not present. Right. Like, depression is. You're thinking about, like, the past and the current, whatever. And anxiety is sort of like your, your mind is three days away and your body's, like, right here. It's like, you Gotta maintain. You gotta stay right here. That's, you know, what. The kind of. The feeling of anxiety. I didn't know what the thoughts were, but they were just sort of. They kept coming ever so slightly, a little bit more, A little bit more. At Wimbledon, I'd asked my dad, like, when you had that heart attack, like, and you had the thing put in, like, have you ever thought, like, it may come back? Or. No, no, I feel good, you know, whatever. I was like, okay, you know, problem. And I'd ask another guy who had an ablation that I knew of, it was around the tennis world, and same exact question. No, I never had that, you know, kind of thing, you know. And little by little, these weeks will go by and we're playing Wimbledon and. And I'm. I'm having success in these tournaments. In the fourth round in Wimbledon, made the quarters of. In Canada and Toronto. I mean, the quarters of Cincinnati lost to Roger. And like, I'm beating all the players I should be, and I'm losing the players that, like, are really good players until it got to a point where. And I was totally fine on the court. I had enough things to think about on the court. That was my only safe haven, was like, I don't have any of these thoughts on the tennis court. So once I get on the tennis court, I'm good. Like, I'm. I'm. This is my happy place. I'm good. I played a third round match at the US Open against a French guy named Gilles Simone, who's a really tough, like, annoying player to play. You're super fast. Everything comes back, gets everything back. And I got in. I was like, the fourth set, and I got there, it was like four, two in the fourth or three, two serving in the fourth. And I look at the clock in the corner. It's. And it said like 12:45am it was a late. You know, it was a late match. We were on Arthur Ash. Was that one of those night matches like they had last night with center on there, there? And I. I, like, my mind started spiraling, like, oh, no. Like, now I'm gonna. Even if I win this set, I'm not gonna get home until I gotta do press, I gotta do stretch down, I got ice, blah, blah, all this stuff. And all of a sudden, my mind. So all of a sudden on the court was. T was gone. Like, my. That little safe haven was now.
