Simona Halep spent over a year away from tennis due to her doping suspension and used that time wisely to focus on activities other than tennis.
Being a professional athlete is very difficult because athletes have to maintain a lot of discipline in many spheres of life. They have to take care of their body and mental health, and they just have to diligently work on keeping themselves capable of competing at the highest level.
Halep didn't need to do that during her doping suspension because the resolution of that matter took a few months, and in her case, over a year, to finally come. Still, she focused on keeping healthy and in good shape, but on a more personal level as opposed to the athlete's level.
Speaking about it to the Tennis Channel, Halep noted that she tried to live as a normal person rather than an athlete. Her routine up until that point was almost military-like, which gets tiresome after a while.
"I was focusing more on my person than [as] an athlete. So I was taking care of my body, I was taking care of my mental, I transformed everything into a personal lifestyle. . . I just enjoyed life day by day, that I never had the chance to live normal in this 25 years because I was always, in the schedule, always strict, always something to do."
"The schedule was like an army, I would say. And now it was like I could go by the pool, I could go to a hair salon, I could go to do all this stuff that a person, normal person can do it. So I enjoyed it."
Halep has returned to tennis since then, but her return has been quite bumpy. Her body is not keeping up right now, which might be because of her lack of proper training in recent months.
She was forced to withdraw from multiple tournaments, and even retire during her most recent match at the WTA 125K tournament in Paris, as she started feeling a knee pain.
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