Adjustment required; 3.6, Competition rounds; 71, Ratio; 0.051
Blimey, it’s been a while. Just over 3 weeks to be exact. As I mentioned then, I was going the best part of two weeks without playing, due to being out of the country.
When I returned, I played a couple of evenings shortly after my return, a mixture of garbage followed by some decent stuff. It always seems to be one of the fundamental things in my game that goes. A few weeks ago it was my alignment, so I spent some time working on that, and fast forward a little while and suddenly I was making another diagnosis – this time that my hands were too vertical at address, and they should be a couple of inches in front of the ball. When I suddenly work out what I’ve been doing wrong, invariably it is something so basic that I feel stupid for not figuring it out earlier. This is where the pros are different. Apart from having several people to diagnose these things at a moment’s notice, their setup is just a standard, they don’t even need to think about it.
My first competitive game back was a Tigers match away from home, and a combination of me playing decent but not spectacular, and my opponent not having the best of days, ended with me winning 7&6. I’ll certainly take that for the opening match of the year.
The following day was a chance to put my new found confidence towards getting my handicap reduced. The first nine holes backed this up as I turned in one under par. I hit the ball as well as I have in a long long time. In the back nine I still played some holes okay, but to be blunt I collapsed. I actually only hit four bad shots, but they were absolute stinkers (two shanks and two fat wedges) which cost me 7 shots in total. I finished the obligatory 1 shot over buffer zone, meaning another 0.1 to be added.
The weekend past followed a similar theme. Saturday was a competition, 2 over after 13 holes then I inexplicably double bogied 14 and 15, and once again finished 1 shot over buffer zone.
Sunday was another match which resulted in a fairly comfortable defeat, having said that our opponents were 3 under for the last 8 holes which turned the game.
So far this year I have played in ten qualifying competitions, and the results paint a frightening picture. One reduction, one buffer zone, eight increases. My handicap is now the highest it has been in 22 months.
You may remember the graph below, showing my competition performance coded green for cuts, yellow for buffer zone, and red for increases.
I have overlaid my 2011 adjustments against the final 2010 breakdown with a lighter background. I am falling down on exactly the thing I identified last season I need to stop – narrowly missing buffer zone. Four of the eight increases this year have involved missing buffer zone by only one or two shots. You can click on any graph to enlarge it.
The next graph puts these scores into categories, and although it is early days in 2011, I need to start playing better, quickly.
I went out tonight and started playing quickly, and started playing better.
2 hours and 3 minutes later, I’d putted out 18 holes as if in competition conditions and shot 73, my best score of the year. I hit 15 greens in regulation, which is a year high as well.
Where does this leave my game? I don’t know, to be honest. I’ve gone from having 6 good holes per round, up to 9 good holes for a while, and I’m now up at about 14 good holes per round, but it’s still not enough.
Where does it leave this blog? It’s not difficult to see that the blog posts have been more sporadic this year. Second season syndrome I suppose. Most of the things which were new to write about last year aren’t new any more, and I’m getting a bit fed up of saying “I’m not far away but I need to start making it count”, every time I say that I become a bit more of a parody of myself. I’m also identifying that in order to be off scratch by the end of September I need to take the next 6 months off work as I’m not going to do it without spending several thousand pounds on coaching.
Add in other factors such as; work taking me away from home quite a lot, taking over the running of a golf league and website that requires a bit of my time, and the fact it’s less fun to write when my handicap is ballooning, means my posts are going to be a bit less frequent than in the past. Otherwise I’ll just be writing for the sake of writing.
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