A Program for the Ungifted

I am not athletically gifted. Anyone who has known me and spent time with me athletically knows that although I do have an aptitude for activity, I was not born with natural athletic ability. That is probably why I excelled the most in my high school years at cross country and track, sports where perseverance can generally (but not completely) make up for lack of natural ability.

I believe golf is in the same category, some hard work and the right training can make up for lack of talent. There could probably be a bibliography for this post, including Tiger Woods' How I play Golf, Golf For Dummies - 2nd Edition (still on loan from Aaron), and a variety of websites including fitforgolfusa.com, all of which contributed to my next thoughts.

From what I can gather, there are four areas that can be addressed in the off season to help anyones golf game:

1. Balance
2. Flexibility
3. Posture
4. Strength

The majority of the exercises I found are structured such that all golfers can be participants. In other words, my grandmother could probably do most of them. Therefore, keeping in mind I am also training for a triathlon in the spring and my recent fascination with core strength and flexibility, I have weeded through dozens of exercises and stretches to come up with an off season improvement program. I will not clutter this post with the details but it is available at this link along with some instructions for those that are interested.

What I have found that may be of immediate interest is that although my balance, flexibility and strength seem to be OK, my posture is terrible. Oddly, I am excited at this revelation and have included a number of stretches and exercises geared toward fixing it. Tiger Woods swears by physical fitness in improving a golf game. Let's hope he's right. It can't hurt right?

Just Kidding

I had the opportunity to take the last two days off from work. Today was exceptionally nice, so for the first time, I played golf alone. It was a mix of boring and tranquil. Either way, although I didn't post the best score of the year, I am much more satisfied with a 9-hole score of 53 than my 18 hole score at Perry Park (see below). Ironically, my handicap went up. Bring on next year!

Not Exactly the Finish I Envisioned

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to once again play my #9 all time course, Perry Park. The pictures I have posted don't do justice to how beautiful the course is. It would probably be ranked higher on my list if it wasn't so disagreeable to my attempts at unembarrassing golf. I was excited, really excited to play. I had been thwarted more than once in the preceding weeks to play a full round at a nice course. Our tee time was at 12:15. We arrived at 12:20. No time for warmups. No time for testing the greens. The only reason we were able to tee off at all was due to our friend who was a member of the club and frequented the course. We arrived at the tee box only seconds before the group scheduled to tee off behind us. Amazingly and despite our best efforts this group of two senior gentleman and two senior ladies who couldn't get the ball more than 5 feet off the ground were on our heels all day. We were even chastened once by the course attendant. Hardly ideal playing conditions on a fantastic autumn afternoon on a spectacular course.


It's probably already apparent that I didn't play well. I was feeling good with the last 9 holes I played, I scored a 49. I was fully prepared to finally break 100 and have a fairy tale ending to my first season........ Not even close. In fact, I played so poorly I contemplated chalking it up as a freak of nature, never to be spoken of again. Not entirely intentional, I left the scorecard on my desk at home until Stephanie finally threw it away as the trash it was. "Unfortunately" this happened before I could record the stats. : ) But to improve, failures need to be recognized. So my current handicap reflects my 118 score that frustrating day. The nice thing however is that a handicap only uses the 10 best scores of the last 20 rounds in the calculation. And so ended my first season with a 25.8 handicap. Not bad considering my estimated handicap at the beginning of the season was 35.

Although my clubs are packed away in the garage for the winter, I have several posts in mind for the coming weeks and months including a review of a great new golf tips book I found, how I was nearly gored by a buck at Perry Park and a few things I learned about chipping, not to mention my goals and strategies for next year...