Mersin Men’s $10k (week 1), Day 8

Wednesday 23rd May 2012

Today’s been another great training day and our last heavy day before we start tapering down tomorrow before the qualifying of the next event starts on Saturday.

Like yesterday we were up early and at breakfast by 6.30am so that we could warm up and be ready to play by 8am. This morning we were joined by fellow Brit Jamie Feaver and Dave and I both knew that it was going to be a good session as Jamie is not only a good player but he’s also one of the hardest working and most professional players I know.

Dave and Jamie had a very high quality drilling session for the first hour before the second hour was spent playing out a set. Dave worked very hard throughout the session and even though the intensity of the first hour took a lot out of him he still put in a good performance in the set but one break of serve in the first game and the last game of the set resulted in Dave going down 6-3.

After two hours on court we went back to the hotel to relax before going back to the club at midday to get some lunch and watch some of the main draw matches. At 3.30pm we were back on court for our second session of the day but this time it was more about a few specific areas of Dave’s game rather than point play. We continued with the work we’d been doing all week on the development of Dave’s net game and after working on it for a solid hour we came off court at 4.30pm and went straight into the gym for his strength and conditioning session. Today it was a weights session which lasted about 45 minutes and involved both upper and lower body exercises in the same ‘super-set’ format as Dave did on Monday.

By 5.30pm we were still not done and it was outside to the swimming pool so that Dave could go through a recovery session in the water. He was only scheduled to do 2 sets of 5 different exercises but it was the first time Dave had gone through this programme and as he was really feeling the benefits of it with each exercise he did he actually ended up doing 6 sets!