Nice comment. to answer your questions: 1. I did post the scores for my handicap, although just for the first round (second round was more about fun and hitting a couple shots some times, so didn’t keep score although I shot about the same on both) and it was a straight up 94 seeing as I didn’t have any holes over a 7. 2. Yes. I think now more than ever that I will be around a 3 handicap by the 3,000 hour. Time will tell

Thanks,

Dan

Thank you for the wonderful comments on this post and for the support. It really means a lot to me.

I agree that the hours spent putting were good hours. I think I didn’t get my thoughts across clearly in my post.. What I meant to say was more about how I feel that even though the time was about building mechanics, I think that it could have been beneficial to also have been experiencing the game along the way too. I spent the 8 months of my training without ever stepping a foot onto a golf course and instead practiced on practice greens and chipping areas/ranges. Having the experience of Bandon this week I think, in retrospect, that it would have been a good idea to also add in a round every couple of weeks somewhere so that one could get a better feel for what the game of golf is all about.

There’s no sense looking back, though, as tomorrow is a new day and a new chance to learn. The future is looking very bright and Bandon was a good eye opener of things to come down the road. I cannot wait for another chance to play down there, next time it’s about revenge

Thank you all again!

Dan

If you’re developing that and feel confident over the ball, that is what matters most. Being able to read different greens at different speeds is something you can then add to what you already know. By all accounts, you’ve developed the base.

Hitting 10 greens is really an achievement. While you may be feeling some pride at where you’re at with the driver, it appears your approaches, or mid-game was really the strength you enjoyed that day.

You don’t find great technique on the golf course, you bring it there. The only way to get it is by hours and hours of ‘deliberate’ practice on the range and putting green.

Once you have great mechanics, learning how to use them on different courses with different grasses in different conditions will come with experience. It doesn’t take too long to figure out how to play and what types of shots to play in different situations. But you must have great mechanics to begin with.

In my humble opinion, you may have gone to the course too soon if anything. I’d concentrate on the mechanics for at least the first 6000 hours and worry about the course later.

Stay focused on the goal. You can do it.
Martin.

Putting, the game inside a game. Another perfect example of the insanity the golf can produce. You could go golfing your first time and have 35 putts. Then devote two years to being a better putter and go right back out and routinely have 35 putts…

The imperceptible difference (such as a couple of degrees open/close) will cause a putt to miss from a very short distance. (Not to mention the putter head moving a few mph to fast or slow leaving a second putt that is next to impossible. (http://thesandtrap.com/b/the_numbers_game/angles_of_error)

At the end of the day, it almost seems like the numbers required to pull it all off are unattainable. If you watch pro’s and realize how perfect those putts need to be for them to drop as many as they do you start to realize that their is something else happening there. Luke Donald went how many hundres of holes without a three putt. You had a math analogy in your blog(These people are the rainmen of the golfing world) How do you practice ‘that’s a 13 degree downhill slope with a 4 degree left to right that requires 8mph(+-2 mph) putting stroke with face angle within .5 degrees of the required starting line.

How can ‘these’ people be so much better than the rest? Simple if you keep taking 1% of 1% of 1% of any group of people doing any task at some point you are going to end up with a group of people well outside of the realm or several standard deviations of normal ability.

TLDR, golf looks a lot easier then it is. Two questions for you Dan.

1. Did you report your scores for your handicap?
2. Do you still plan/expect to be below a 3 handicap in < 800 hours?

The bad news, potentially, is facing the reality that putting is the most important component in scoring, and that there are three components to competitive putting: reading greens, developing a sound, repeatable stroke, and controlling nerves under pressure. Although almost anyone can become proficient at all three aspects of the process, to become a successful pro requires absolute mastery of them. Many of us believe that some aspects of this mastery are innate: visualization in 3-D space, hand-eye coordination, and a kind of competitive grace. Although one can dramatically improve in each of these aspects, perhaps achieving pro-level mastery (like my golfing hero Larry Nelson) is more a matter of genetic predisposition than practice.

Your quest may or may not provide answers to this question – namely, whether 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is a sufficient, or merely a necessary, precondition to mastery. From my own experience as a runner and coach I’m inclined to think it’s the latter. As a fan The Plan and golf, I’m hoping you’ll prove me wrong.