Time to get back to everyday life!

Hi,

After being crowned league champions on thursday night, the last few days have been spent mostly on celebrating. The final match on thursday ended around 23.30 and after being presented with the gold medals and the trophy I (and 5 other players) had to do a dopingtest, so we didn't get back to the club until 1.15 in the night. Noone seemed to care though and we all celebrated the win the rest of the night. The party ended at 6 in the morning, I finished a bit earlier, but still didn't go for my training friday morning :) I'm pretty sure noone did! I didn't do anything friday actually, I felt so tired in my body so thought it would be wise to take it easy for a day. Not hard to figure out why I was so tired... My singles match lasted for an hour, the team match took 3½ hours and I was up till late in the night. Pretty hard both physically and mentally!

Speaking of my singles, it was a good game, very intense and with a lot of good rallies. I started off committing some easy mistakes, don't know why actually as I didn't really feel nervous, but nonetheless the mistakes were there... I lost the first set 21-17 after being 2-3-4 points behind all the time. The 2nd set started off in the same way as the 1st, but when I was 7-3 down my attacking game began to get going and I was up 11-8 at the break. I maintained this advantage all the way up to 18-15, then lost 3 points in a row and I qucikly felt the pressure as he was about to give his team the start they dreamed of. But I managed to control my mind and played the next 3 points to perfection which handed me the set 21-18. The crowd was ecstatic, it was really a great to feel the huge support the fans from Greve gave me. They definetly helped me to get back into the game. The 3rd set saw me have a slight edge, but I never managed to create a gap greater than 2 points even though I had a few good chances. This was the picture all the way up to 17-15, then he played 6 really good rallies where he was very agressive and unfortunately I didn't have any response! 21-17 for him and the game was over. Overall it was a good game and it was another step forward for me. I'm getting closer to a high consisten level of play again. It's nice to see it's going in the right direction. Still I was very dissapointed just after the match and felt like I had let my team down, but luckily they all responded by playing some excellent badminton to make up for my loss and secured us the win. Needless to say, the feeling I had when we won the last point was fantastic. I felt joy, satisfaction and relief at the same time. This combined with 500-600 crazy Greve supporters shouting and all of my teammates running onto the court to celebrate with our mens doubles (who won the decisive match) send a feeling through my body that's hard to describe. But this is exactly that kind of feeling that makes all the hard work worth it! Being a part of this and also playing in an atmosphere like that is something I'll remember for a very long time. Hopefully I'll get to experience this again next year!

Saturday and sunday were tough days as we I had to train again and still needed to go to Greve a few times to do some more celebrations and saturday night there was a huge party where everyone in the world of badminton here in Denmark was invited. Again I stayed out till early in the morning, so when I got to sleep last night I think it was well deserved!

Today life returned to "normal". Training in the morning, a bit of work in the afternoon and relaxing in the evening. I have to start focussing on the upcomming events here in April. First thing comming up is the Finnish International Challenge which I'll leave for on wednesday. I really hope to keep up the good play there, but we will see how big the effect of the last few days will be. I'll try to find some time to tell you all a bit on my draw and expectation for this tournament, but right now I'm off to bed!

Keep well,

HK