Canadian tennis player Bianca Andreescu, 24, the 2019 champion here at the US Open, has endured some ups and downs in her career. Last summer she spoke about everything she had thought about during her time away from tennis on a spiritual retreat in Costa Rica.

The time away allowed her to work on her physical and mental health, developing a large and growing toolbox for handling setbacks. Little did Andreescu know that she was about to learn a lot more, opening up that toolbox and going through it all, all over again.

This time, it was a stress fracture in her back that would sideline her for nine months — the latest in a string of bad-luck ailments that have threatened the career of a woman widely seen as a generational talent, whose presence on a tennis court draws eyeballs with an emotional pull as obvious as it is inexplicable.

“It sucked,” Andreescu said of that latest calamity, one evening in Paris in June. She spoke to The Athletic‘s Matt Futterman about her journey, an interview you can enjoy below.

Andreescu faces Jasmine Paolini at 7pm local time (EDT), 4pm PT, midnight BST.