Fresh and Clean

I feel so fresh it’s ridiculous.  Having taken the past week off to explore some Yosemite woods might have been the best thing that I have done for my golf game this entire year.  Sure, there have been tons of leaps and bounds over the last 8 calendar months, but I feel fully recharged and ready to take on/down anything that might want to get in the way of progress.  The march continues, one step at a time just as Mary and I trekked to the top of Clouds Rest and El Capitan.  It always seems far away at first, but keep your head to the ground and before you know it you’re half way up the beast.

In total, we hiked 65 miles and gained more than 11,000 feet in elevation.  We did three 15+ mile days and had two shorter days spent hiking around local lakes.  We camped in the valley for a few nights then went up to the northwest for two starry nights and didn’t catch the Hantavirus that everyone was forwarding stories to us about.  I had my phone turned off for 5 days and instead of replying to emails and texts I spent time thinking and existing.

It was the perfect vacation and couldn’t have come at a better time.  My body feels back to normal, albeit a bit stronger from the long days of hiking and carrying a pack, and mentally I am as far from burnout as I was on the first day of The Dan Plan.

It will take a few days to fully process the trip, but for the time being I wanted to reiterate that time away may be just as important as time spent practicing.  There has to be a good balance, of course, but getting too saturated in practice can lead to mental dead ends.  We all need time to step back and analyze the situation.

Today, I decided to play 18 instead of spending my first day back on the range or putting green.  After an hour of warming back into the swing I teed it up with two normal playing partners at Heron Lakes to see what a week off would do to my game.  At first it was a little rough, I had a couple iron shots that didn’t exactly look pretty and the swing wasn’t quite feeling natural, but after a few holes the game began to return and I made some great shots.  Two drives and one iron shot in particular were surprisingly long.  On the 9th hole, I teed it up and hit a solid drive.  The hole was playing 380 and when I got to my ball the marker on the ground said 65 yards to the middle of the green.  It wasn’t too windy and it was the farthest I had ever hit a drive on flat ground.  Two holes later I surpassed that mark by hitting a bomb 325 yards.  The two guys I was playing with usually hit their drives the same distance as me, but on those I was about 40-50 yards further down the green.  I’m honestly not sure what happened, except that I felt good out there making the swings.  I look forward to the day that these types of drives become more of a regular shot and not the exception of the day.

At the end the round, I shot an easy 80.  Not knowing what to expect, I was pleasantly surprised with that number.  The greens were incredibly bumpy and my short game touch around the green was a bit off as my feel wasn’t quite there yet, so I missed a few scoring opportunities, but still played solid and made my goal of 10 pars.

Starting tomorrow, all of my practice and play will be at Columbia Edgewater County Club (CECC) to get ready for next week’s PNGA Mid-Am three day tournament.  I want to only practice at CECC so that I can get a good feel for the pace of the greens and feel confident going into my first 3-day tourney.

I am certain that time away will prove priceless in the long run and I have a feeling that today is the first day in the next chapter of The Dan Plan.

On a side note that is somewhat related to this, as it describes one professionals view of the learning stages, Whitney Johnson and her co-author Juan Carlos Méndez-Garcia wrote a blog for the Harvard Business Review that has The Dan Plan as an example.  You can read the story here:

http://blogs.hbr.org/johnson/2012/09/throw-your-life-a-curve.html

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