The following blog post is Chapter 1 of Expert in a Year: The Ultimate Table Tennis Challenge, in full. The book was written by myself and Sam Priestley detailing our experience of The Expert in a Year Challenge we undertook during 2014.
If you enjoy reading the first chapter you can buy the book in paperback, for your Kindle, or as an audiobook from Amazon. It is available to download worldwide and in print from the UK and US.
Chapter 1
It had all gone wrong. I couldn’t continue like this. I had to change. Change or give up. I was dedicating myself to a sport, training hard every day while giving up a huge amount of my free time, but I was getting nowhere. No, I’m not talking about table tennis. I’m talking about rowing.
It had started out great. Three years earlier we had been given the opportunity to take up rowing at school. To entice us, they put on a taster session. We were given oars, packed into boats, and let loose to play around. Lots of splashing, very little moving, and a fair amount of laughter followed. 14-year-old Sam loved it. It was fun, and I was rubbish at hockey, so I signed up.
From there it began to ramp up and slowly people started dropping out. That first session had been so much fun that almost half the year had chosen rowing as their ‘games option’, but by the first winter the majority had quit. Ahh, the winter. Think about how cold your fingers get just from walking around outside. Now imagine not being allowed to wear gloves and having freezing cold water splashed on you every few strokes. It was miserable, but we assured each other that if we could just hold on until spring, it would become awesome again.
Gradually the weather improved, we settled in, and the messing around in boats turned into much more of a sport. By the beginning of the third year, we were down to just four people. Four out of the original 35 had stuck with it. The training grew to a massive 20 hours every week and we prided ourselves on how hardcore we were, how tough.
But I was falling behind. While my boat mates slowly improved, getting better, faster and stronger, I was barely keeping up. I was killing myself, training every day of every week, but it wasn’t enough. Worse, I was being overtaken by some of the younger rowers from the year below. While I was struggling to do the set training, missing a session every week or two, they weren’t. Plus, they were going above and beyond, and it was showing. I was spending a lot of my free time on rowing, a sport that I wasn’t enjoying and wasn’t excelling at. It was the worst of both worlds.
At the back of all of our minds was the dream of someday being able to row for our country; to represent Great Britain. I could go to trials, but there was a requirement; you needed to be able to get a sub 7-minute 2k time on the rowing machine. It was time to make a choice; either put in the extra work to try and reach that goal, or give up.
I hatched a plan. The summer holidays were approaching, a time when everyone would slack off, that is everyone except me. Eager and excited I convinced my coach to let me borrow one of the school’s rowing machines for the break. I promised myself I would train every day and train hard. I would get that sub 7 minute 2k, even if it killed me.
But I didn’t. I failed.
Not only did I fail, but I didn’t even manage to stick to my daily regime. The first week started well but pretty quickly I descended into training when I felt ‘in the mood’, and as a 2k on a rowing machine is a horrible experience, that wasn’t very often. My daily training soon turned into every other day, and by the end of the holiday I was only doing a session or two a week. On the first day back at school, I went to the coach and nervously told him I was quitting. I thought he would be upset, but instead he just looked at me with disappointment and replied: “That’s what I expected”. I haven’t been in a rowing boat since.
What happened? Why did I fail? Was it a lack of motivation? A lack of passion, skill or understanding of the sport? Or just bad genes?
If you had asked my coach, a 6 ft 10 monster, he probably would have told you I didn’t have the genes. My mother, on the other hand, is pretty convinced I can do whatever I put my mind to. “You just didn’t really want it”, she’d say. In some respects, both those reasons are just excuses. At the time when friends asked me why I’d quit I had other excuses. I would tell them it was because I wasn’t tall enough or that I’d hurt my back and the physio had told me to stop. Both were true, but they weren’t the real reasons either.
I quit because I failed my challenge, and I failed my challenge because it was a half-arsed attempt right from the beginning. I’m telling you about it now, but at the time I told no one; I didn’t even tell my coach why I wanted to borrow the rowing machine. I didn’t want to attempt something and then have to admit I’d failed. Thinking back, as soon as it got tough I slacked off. But why? I think it was to protect myself from failure. “Well, I didn’t really try my hardest”, I could say to myself. “If I had given it everything I wouldn’t have failed. Am I bothered?”
But what would have happened if I’d stuck with it, rather than giving up when failure looked likely? Would I have rowed for my country? Maybe… maybe not. But would I have been a better rower by the end of it? Certainly.
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Do you remember that really sporty kid at school? The one who just seemed to be great at everything; awesome at football, a natural at tennis, fast at running. That wasn’t me. I was a pretty normal kid; I enjoyed sport, running around, fighting and competition. I liked winning and I didn’t like losing.
My parents were pretty typical. They devoured books on how to raise a child and taught me what they value; what they thought would make me the most rounded individual. One of the things early-development books like to talk about is the ABCs of physical literacy and my parents didn’t neglect this side of my education. I remember having basketball parties, I used to run around a lot and I was always climbing on things. I learnt to cycle without stabilisers at the age of four, and for the next ten years our family outings were all long bicycle rides.
But neither of my parents are particularly ‘sporty’ themselves and it seems a few key skills slipped through the net. I didn’t learn how to throw a ball, how to kick a football, how to jump and land properly, or how to run correctly. If they themselves didn’t know how to do these things how could they teach me? I didn’t learn them as a young child, and after that I quickly got to an age where I ‘should’ at least be proficient. An age where it’s embarrassing if you don’t have them.
Take football for example. I never play football – why? It’s not that I don’t enjoy it, it’s because I don’t like feeling like a fool. Whenever I play football I am so bad at it I tend to walk off or just stand at the back, trying to avoid the ball. I can barely kick it in a straight line! What do kids do during lunchtime, every day from the age of 8 to 18? They play football. That is everyone except those of us who were too bad to play. By the time I reached 18 I had played hardly any football, our nation’s most popular pastime (although maybe that’s Facebook nowadays) and I’d barely got involved at all. I have no idea how much football the average person has played, but it’s thousands of hours more than me. No wonder I look so clumsy.
What happens when you’re 14 years old and someone asks you to throw them a ball, and you wildly miss? Everyone laughs at you and you never want to throw anyone a ball again. I went through about eight years when I would always throw people stuff underarm because there was a chance they would laugh at me if I did a rubbish overarm throw. But that means that while I’m avoiding practicing these skills, I’m never going to get any better. It’s never going to not be embarrassing. I’m never going to be good enough to join in.
It’s easy enough for me now to theorise about why I struggled with certain sports, but at the time all I knew was that that was the way of the world, and there was nothing I could do about it. I do really enjoy sport and luckily there are sports that don’t rely so much on these fundamental coordination skills which I was able to naturally gravitate towards. I have tried rock climbing, shooting, and archery. They all had one thing in common – the key skills aren’t taught to many people at a young age. Most people give them a go as they get older.
An even better example is rowing. The skills you require to be good at rowing are ones you never learn until you get in a boat. No one gets into a rowing boat for the first time and can naturally beat someone who has been practicing and taught proper technique for even just a few weeks. Most people, sat in a single boat and told to race, would just capsize.
After rowing, I didn’t do much sport until university when I took up running; but not competitive running. I used to go and do a 5K run on the running machine every day for about 8 months. Every day for 8 months! Almost every time I would get faster. It was awesome; direct results. I wasn’t comparing my improvement to anyone else and nobody could see or judge what I was doing. I was just getting personal bests each and every day. I went from stumbling through a 5K run in 28 minutes, to blitzing through it in a very respectable 19.
Then I got injured. As anyone who is into running will tell you, it was probably inevitable. Apparently you’re not meant to push your body like that every day. The physio told me I’d never be able to run that fast again, but it had really sparked an interest. After my failure at rowing and a lifetime of being bad at football, it was a real eye-opener. If I could go from being a podgy, below average runner, to being one of the fastest people I knew, what else is possible?
One sport that most people have never played much of is table tennis. Sure, everybody has played but very few go beyond the mucking about stage. In 2013, I went on an out-of-season, mid-week holiday with my flatmates to Tenerife. The place was deserted with literally nothing to do but play table tennis on this slightly damp, dirty outdoor table. We were all rubbish, but it was fun and by the end of the few days we were there, we had got very competitive. Toby was the best, but Dan and I didn’t feel that far behind.
We enjoyed it so much that when we got home we purchased a table tennis table which we could just about cram into our communal kitchen/living room. I thought that we’d quickly catch up with Toby, but it didn’t happen. We were all improving, but he somehow managed to maintain his lead.
Toby put his dominance down to the quick reactions he’d picked up from being a goalkeeper while at school. I would hardly ever beat him. We’d play ten games and he’d win nine, and nothing I was doing seemed to help. “You need to stop trying to hit the ball so hard”, he would say. But how could I improve if I didn’t go for shots? I kept thinking that if he keeps playing slow and conservative eventually I’ll just be able to smash the ball past him, but it never happened. Was it literally just the goalkeeping experience that set him apart, or was there something about him that made him inherently better than me?
At the same time Toby, Dan and I were busy competing inexpertly in our kitchen, my friend Ben Larcombe, who happened to be a professional table tennis coach, was coming up with a challenge. A challenge where he would intensively train an adult novice in the skills of table tennis in order to dispel a myth that was haunting the sport; the commonly held belief that you could only absorb the correct technique if you started learning at a very young age. The misconception that adults were “too old” to get any good. This would eventually become ‘The Expert in a Year Challenge’ and my competitive desire to beat Toby combined with my recently formed belief in the power of practice, would make me the perfect guinea pig.
Buy the book
Expert in a Year: The Ultimate Table Tennis Challenge is the complete story of the experiment, written in Sam’s words. If you are a beginner/improver that is serious about developing your table tennis, this is a must read.
Here is the blurb…
Sam Priestley was never Mr Sporty. After failed attempts at rowing and running he had all but given up on the possibility of becoming a sportsman. That was until childhood friend, and table tennis coach, Ben Larcombe convinced him to act as the guinea pig in an experiment he had concocted – The Expert in a Year Challenge.
Starting 1st January 2014 novice Sam was immersed in the world of competitive table tennis. He began training every day and over the course of the year notched up hundreds of hours of practice in an attempt to reach a seemingly impossible goal. There was blood, sweat, tears, injuries, frustrations and moments of elation as the pair travelled up and down the UK, and beyond, in their quest for training, mentors and competition. Sam found potential he never thought he had, got better at table tennis than most people thought possible, and discovered what it feels like when 1.5 million people watch you fail. Here is their story, including all the ridiculous training methods and unreachable goals, and the surprising lessons they learnt from playing table tennis every day for a year.
If you would like to buy a copy of Expert in a Year: The Ultimate Table Tennis Challenge (by Sam Priestley & Ben Larcombe) you can do so on Amazon. It is available as an ebook for Kindle, a physical print book, and an audiobook (coming soon).
In the UK, you can buy it from Amazon.co.uk for £3.99 (Kindle), and £8.99 (Paperback).
In the US, you can buy it from Amazon.com for $5.99 (Kindle), and $13.99 (Paperback).
It is also available from Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India,Italy,Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, and Spain.