Long time readers may recall me setting out some loose targets for the year, based around 7 competitions that I am playing that I have called “My Majors”. These are 7 competitions that, although not the be all and end all of my season, are certainly competitions that I want to prepare for and perform as well as I possibly can. The first of these 7 competitions is next Saturday, and they following fairly regularly every 3 weeks or so for the next 4 months.
Having played an average of 5 times per week in the last month, it is somewhat unhelpful that in the last full week before my first "major", I have played once, and have spent the rest of the time sitting on my sofa eating chocolate. Okay, well maybe not all of the time eating chocolate, but it feels like it. I intended to have a couple of days off because of my knee being sore, but it’s amazing how that couple of days can extend, and soon it quickly becomes 5 days without hitting a proper golf shot. Once you are in that state of not playing golf at least every 48 hours it is amazing how difficult it is to quickly regain that motivation.
I had another lesson on Saturday, and I have to admit that I didn’t get as much out of it as I should have. This was entirely my fault, it was early in the morning, I wasn’t zoned in as much as I should have been, I didn’t write down notes straight away afterwards, and to be honest, it was difficult. Every lesson I’ve had so far has been about basic things I understand, this one was a bit more technical, which is something I’ve never really had to deal with before. I will try and see if I can get a 5 minute refresher over the next couple of days, write it all down, then start working hard on it.
I finally beat the motivation back into me today, with 18 holes in a club competition. The course was set up probably as hard as I have ever seen it, the flag positions were very difficult, and there was a very strong northerly wind, which is the most difficult (and coldest) wind direction.
I managed to hit my irons terribly, hitting 8 out of 18 greens in regulation (2nd lowest of the season), yet my short game was pretty sharp and helped me knock it round in 77, net 74. This was good enough to be the best net score among the group of 12 people I played with by 2 shots, and the best gross score by 5 shots. Although normally a net 74 would mean my handicap going up, because of the conditions I reckon the CSS (Competition Scratch Score) could go up, meaning my handicap will remain at 3.4. If my handicap does go up then it means I’ll have an extra shot to play with on Saturday, so it wouldn’t be a disaster. It would have been easy to deliberately score badly to get my handicap up that 0.1 in time for Saturday, but that’s not how I believe golf should be played – you should always play and try your best, if my handicap has gone up today it wasn’t for the lack of trying to keep it as low as possible.
This week I’m determined to practice a bit more, Tuesday and Thursday are the only days I can manage due to work, and then it will be an early start on Saturday to get to Wyke Green. I’ll post up a bit more about Saturday’s competition during the week. I am also going to give mobile blogging a go at the weekend, to post an update after the first 18 holes and again after the afternoon round. It should be easy to do via my BlackBerry, and if it works well then I’ll do this in all of my “majors”.
One final thing, good luck Tony for your trip to the States, you have a lot of people (me included) very jealous of going and hitting golf balls for 3 months solid. Make the most of it, enjoy it, and make sure you’re a scratch player when I see you at the end of the summer.
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