As fresh as a mountain huckleberry

Made it.  We camped for a handful of nights in Glacier National Park in what must have been the best weather of the year up there and we neither got eaten by a bear nor mountain lion slashed.

I also had a solid ten days of rest to allow not just my shoulder some respite, but the entire mind/body package as well.  It was good to get away; in retrospect I was starting to get a little burnt out from the swing changes and lack of scoring and my focus was in the wrong place.

Time away produces a fresh brain and I brought that to the course yesterday.  It was kind of funny, though.  I hit a few balls on the range and literally almost missed one, topped a couple, hit a few fat and in general didn’t quite “get” how to hit an iron shot.  Just 10 days off and it all felt so foreign to me, quite surprising.

I had decided, though, to bring the swing that I was establishing before my time away to the course so went out and played some holes.  My first drive split the fairway; it was right down the darn middle and I was very happy to see that; crazy good sign.  Standing over my first iron shot I was a bit less than confident and managed to top the the shot shooting it right into the trees.  I dropped another and pulled off something decent and the rest of the 27 holes that I played went about like that.  I dropped two or three balls from every shot and 1/3 of them were wonderful, 1/3 horrible and 1/3 playable.  It was about warming my mind and body back up to golf so the entire day I just played multiple balls from different locations to remind myself of what it meant to make shots and hit balls with some sort of target in mind.  It gave me a huge appreciation for those of you that only get to play a couple of times a month.  Not sure how you do it without a handful of “warmup” holes.  It took me 9 holes just to remember how to hit a solid iron shot.

Today I went out and decided to play for score for a new reason.  While in the woods I realized that the swing conversion was modestly finished and that I needed to spend more time learning once again what it meant to actually play the game.  I’ve been in a swing-change funk for about 3 months and am finally ready to start scoring again. So, today I went out and decided it was time to play 18 like a real 18.  Just one ball and every shot mattered.  It’s been way too long and I was excited to get back into the swing.

At Riverside there are a lot of doglegs and you have to be able to move the ball both left and right out of the box.  The first hole and the 15th are the only ones that don’t demand some sort of shot shape and on the first today I managed to hit it right down the middle.  Over the past month or so my tee shots have started to get a million times better.  My misses are still horrid, but I have been connecting on at least 8 shots a round that hit the fairway, which is majorly better than a few months ago when I was lucky to hit one fairway.  It’s all progress and ways to notice how the changes are beneficial.

All in all, I hit 8 fairways as well as 3 greens on the par 3s.  It wasn’t the best round of my life by any means as I shot an 82, but that was with some lordy awful iron shots from the fairway that should have been easily stuck on the green. I was a bit rusty, yet happy with the total score for the day.  It’s been a while since I shot in the lower 80s and it means something to me. The good times are always around the corner, but I was fully capable of enjoying a decent round back at it.

With that in mind, I am starting a new chapter of the project.  The swing change still needs some big tweaks, but it’s time to take that to the course and work on it in a natural setting.  I’m not going to spend a ton of time hitting on the range any more (at least for the time being) as  that is what caused my shoulder problem in the first place.  The goal is to remember how to score and play the game and then when not on the course work primarily on the short game.  The short game is the money winner anyway and needs more attention.

I am extremely excited about this next step.

On an unrelated note, my buddy Country Club sent me a pic of his divot repair tool next to a brand new one.  He’s never sharpened it with anything outside of sticking it in the sandy grass of a putting green, but after hundreds of thousands of divot repairs it has gone from brand new (left) to where it is currently.  That’s some golfing dedication!

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I’m very curious as to how many divots you need to fix to make that amount of change in metal..

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