I’ve had a bit of an up and down weekend, going through various emotions and opinions of my golf game, but hopefully I’m over the worst of things now.
I’ve played 2 competitions for my handicap in the last 3 days, and the eagle-eyed reader will notice that my handicap has increased 0.2 since the last time I posted, indicating that both rounds were quite unsuccessful.
The first 11 holes on Friday were actually alright, apart from a disaster on the 2nd hole, but the last 7 holes were just pathetic. I managed a grand total of 4 stableford points on those 7 holes. For someone to play to their handicap requires scoring 2 points per hole, so I was 10 over my handicap for those 7 holes. I finished with one of my worst totals ever for 18 holes of golf, and I was quite down afterwards, especially because of having had a lesson and having practiced recently. I was confident though that my game had bottomed out at that point, it was at the bottom of a trough, couldn’t get any worse, and the good golf would start again shortly.
I was only half right. The first 9 holes today were just as bad as the last 7 on Friday. I had a grand total of 9 stableford points at the halfway stage, and for around an hour I was genuinely thinking about withdrawing from the Craw’s Nest Tassie and giving up the entire game indefinitely. I was planning how much I could get for selling all my equipment, and alternative hobbies I could take up to fill in my social time. At that point I just did not know where the next shot was going. Golf can be an extremely frustrating and depressing game if you are playing badly, are hitting the ball all over the place, and haven’t got a clue why it’s happening. But it is also a mysterious game, as there is no rational reason why I played the last nine holes today in 1 under par, making 21 stableford points and generally hitting ball really well. It just came from nowhere. If anyone discovers the reason why people’s games can just totally change from one hour / day / week to the next, they will make a lot of money from selling that knowledge. So on the balance of the weekend as a whole I am playing terribly, however on the basis of the last 9 holes I’m playing really well.
My handicap is now the highest it has been for 64 weeks, and I’m now closer to being a 5 handicapper than I am a 3 handicapper, not really what I had in mind when I started this blog; the plan was to get down to 1 this year with a final push down to scratch next year. Whilst I haven’t had the best of years so far, I hope this shows how difficult it is to get down to a really low handicap whilst holding down a full time job. To get down to scratch I need to be practising every single day without fail, and I just can’t commit to that. So I’ll keep trying my best, but even I am now realising just how difficult this task is.
To the people who start various blogs about trying to get down from 10 to scratch in a year; I’m trying to get from 3 to scratch in 2 years, and just short of halfway through I’ve gone from 3 to 4. I wish you all luck, but unless you can put your entire life on hold for a year it isn’t going to happen.
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