Yesterday marked the seventh straight day of golf on my mini-tour (AKA sanity test). It turns out fatigue is a thing. However, it’s not a situation where it’s making it impossible, or even difficult, to go on. In fact, I am more convinced than ever that I will be able to go 50 straight days walking courses across America (at this point, honestly I’m more worried about 50 days of sitting in a car for hours at a time). However, it does have an effect on the quality of my play (don’t laugh, there is actually some quality in my play!!!), which is something I will have to manage.
Each time I addressed the ball to take a shot, my legs would let me know – in no uncertain terms – that they’ve had enough of this particular repeated action. Again, they’re not so sore that it was preventative, but it had the effect of causing me to come up out of my swing too early if I didn’t really focused on staying down throughout the entire process (great if you are the featured artist in a game of whack-a-mole… not so good for a golfer). This can cause some real problems with accuracy. My conclusion thus far is that this is going to be far more mentally challenging than it is physically.
Of course, when you are looking at sights like this, and there are bunnies and quail running around on almost every hole… it’s still pretty easy to enjoy the round.
We played Quail Hollow in Boise, which my favorite local course. What I really like about the course is that it puts a real premium on accuracy (and has afforded many a golfer the opportunity to work on their club slamming or throwing technique). On this approach, for example, I had to clear two bunkers and a pond on my way to a small green surrounded by trees and a creek… no big deal. Multiple holes on the back nine require longer carries both over water and through gaps in a tree line; very intimidating if your tee to green game is at all off on that particular day. Further, the greens are all sloped and straight putts with little or no break are few and far between. There is a reason I held off on playing this course until I was well into the week… you really want to walk onto this course feeling confident or you can spend almost as much on balls as you do on green fees.
Today will be a different kind of day. I’m going to spend a considerable amount of time at the range, trying to tame my driver (I typically only use irons on the course, most courses are not long enough to really require using woods), and then play a par three course to focus a bit on my scoring game. It’ll be an interesting contrast against today’s demanding play.