Category: Golf

Posted on

Season 1 Week 2 Golf League Night 7/2/2019

Total score 107 with 35 putts

I was able to show up a little early and hit a bucket of balls before the league tee time. It was hot out in the mid-90s and not a cloud in the sky. The goal was to get most of the kinks out of my swing before the round and start hitting all the fairways. What I didn’t account for was how frustrating it could get with hitting 65 balls and not hitting one of them well. I finished the bucket of balls 15 minutes before it was my turn to tee off.

With a lot of doubt in my mind, I teed off with my driver and hit a straight left shoot the made it to the middle of of the fairway…on the adjacent fairway. What a way to start the day.

I ended up playing a smidge better compared to the first week. I didn’t make a large improvement on one single one hole but I did hit a shot better on more than a few bettering my score by three strokes for a total 107.

Goals for next week would be to hit more fairways and STOP losing balls!

Shot of the day was my hitting my driver on the 15th. I smoked at a shot that went close to 285 yards right down the right side of the fairway.

285-yard driver shot on the 15th hole at Jackson Park
Posted on

Weekly Post 7/1/2019

High Lights:

Low Lights:

  • Nothing to bad

The workweek felt like an eternity waiting for the clock to hit quitting time on Friday so we could head up to the lake and take advantage of this summer heat that finally had come.  The usual 90 min drive took almost 3 hours with a baby pit stop and heavy traffic because I think everybody else had the same idea as us.

Fell asleep on the couch way before bedtime and after I finally made it to the bedroom I got a pretty decent amount of sleep compared to the nights earlier in the week. While breakfast was being cooked some of the fams and I decided to try out the new coffee shop in town.

441 Mill St, Fontana-On-Geneva Lake, WI 53125
Coffee @ the Lake

I ordered my usual Iced Mocha and see how it would compare to my favorite Mocha back in Chicago. It was a decent drink that I would give 3.5 stars out of 5, It did taste a little watery and which lead to a lack of flavor profile in the chocolate and expresso departments. But at the end of the day, this is review with only 1 drink tasted and due to its proximity to the house I will be going back here for my Mochas so it passes will I drink here again test and that s the one that really matters.

Iced Mocha from the Coffee Mill

On to the golf portion of the weekend. My brother was able to bring his clubs up so we found a tee time that would fit with our schedule at the Grand Geneva (Highlands) I might do a full course review in another post, which hopefully I will put a link here in the future.

It was fun to play with my brother this weekend vacation. It was 8 AM tee time to help us deal with the heat and humidity and not play when it was the hottest. My only real knock on this place was that the recent rain had made the driving range so muddy that they had to limit shots to 150 yards and less.

Grand Geneva Driving Range To wet to hit balls over 150 yards.

Bummer because that is my 9i and wedges. Not giving me a chance to swing my driver and long irons, luckily we chose to play the Highlands course which has the larger fairways of the 2 course st this golf resort. I needed every square inch of those fairways as I sprayed my drives all over the place, mostly out of bounds. Hot some nice long Iron shoots and put ok to score a 100+ scorecard Beers were drunk and bogeys were plentiful to make it a usual fun round of golf.

Brother on the fourth hole fairway
Posted on

1st Golf League Night 6/25/2019

Season-1-Week-1-Shadow-Golf-League-6.25.2019

As I’ve taken a more dedicated focus on my golf game with lessons and range sessions and driving my wife crazy doing drills during commercials of our favorite TV shows. I came to realize that playing social golf with my buds was not the type of competition was not fulfilling my goals. 6 to 7 beers a round and unlimited mulligans mixed with cigars, had me question what was I practicing for if I didn’t care about my score. I looked up some of my local courses and found a Tuesday league that fit my schedule.

It was a shock when I though I signed up for a 9 hole league and I showed up for the first day to find out it was a full round of 18 holes. I wasn’t able to leave work as early as I thought I could so I rolled up just 15 minutes before our tee time.

Not only was I going to play with complete strangers for the first time ever but I was also going to have to tee off with a crowd of about 20 guys that were all in the league as well without any time at the practice range #UnderPressure

To keep myself from being thrown out of the league on the first hole I checked down to my 4 iron and hit a decent shot that just missed the fairway on the right side. The object of this league on this day was to score a few putts a possible. Out of the foursome, I came in third place behind 2 two years veteran of this league. They were good all-around players and were also very welcoming me to their golf world. They also were extremely patient with me as played some of the worst golf ever. This was easily the worst round in the past three years.

It was a good experience to play a round of golf where every stroke was counted and you had to finish all of your putts outside of a foot were gimmes. It really gave me a true picture of where my golf game is currently at. Safe to say it been way worse than what if been sharing… but hey I wasn’t doing it on purpose.

I plan on posting my scores format eh league round to hopefully show my progress. This week will be a screenshot of an excel file until I can figure out how to post properly sized table in a WordPress blog post. Once I figure it out I will go back and update it for better viewing. Can’t wait till next week!

Posted on

Weekly Post 6/24/2019

High Lights:

  • Good range session

Low Lights:

  • Back to Work

It was a tough week having to go back to work.  Sleep is at a premium now and having to be away from home for 9 hours and taking over 17,000 steps really took its toll with me. I’m finding that I’m catnapping any chance I can when I’m home on the couch.  The lack of sleep and 40 hour work week at this rate will be hard to sustain. I’m hoping to catch up on sleep this weekend.

I am not planning to play a round of golf this weekend, but I was itching to get out there and at least swing a club again.

This could be a wild experience since I haven’t been thinking about golf at all this whole month.  I wanted to get to a range and see where my swing was after this forced break.  I knew that the swing was going to need some work and I had envisioned that there will be a good chance in the future to get a few 90 minutes sessions to hit a bucket of balls and work on my swing.  If I can commit that time to work on my swing I should get my game to the best it ever been.

It was a hot day it was in the low 90s with direct sun on me the whole time with the humidity in the air just made it that extra special kinda spicy hot.

The  new wrist hinge movement is gonna need to be re-drilled into my muscle memory, the rest of my swing is at decently playable but if I miss that hinge movement its becomes not a fun game to play,  As soon as I get tired that is the first thing to go on the course which leads to balls going push left,  and the bummer part is they fly so far that they always travel out of bounds causing a lot of lost ball penalties.

This is exactly what happened in the heat the first 30 balls were actually struck pretty well and very balanced.  after the 30 balls, my tempo started to shorten and the balls started hooking and slicing no matter what the club.  I’ll save you some reading about the last 60 balls I hit. They were that bad, but this was the first time back and know I know I need to get back home and get back to my drills to help my body swing the club naturally.  Lots of work and learning to do. I’m motivated to get after it.

Posted on

Weekly Post 6/3/2019

Highlights:

  • 2 Rounds of Golf

Lowlights:

  • Only 2 workouts

Another fun Thursday round at Harborside this week. It is hard not to play here when they are still charging 65$ to play 18 with cart included. Will be some tough pills to swallow when they raise their rates back up to 100-110$ but there are plenty of courses around the Chicago land area that cost right at that 65$ range, so no worries. Plus its be nice to add some more golf balls to my collection.

I also left work early on Friday to go play with my brother and his friends out in the suburb of Desplains. Our tee time was at 3:30 pm so we’re needed to huff it if we were going to play all 18 holes before sunset. The course was chosen by my brother’s friends due to its proximity to one of their parent’s house garage where they were temporarily storing their clubs. We played at Indian Boundary golf course which is part of the Cook County Forest Preserve system. It has been raining all week and a lot the week, but I wasn’t nervous about the course conditions at worst I thought we were only going to be regulated to cart path only but too much of my dismay…

This course was not able to handle all of the rain that we had been getting as I mentioned earlier in this post. To be fair we were playing in a forest persevere so all the water in the area was draining and settling in the marsh and low lying area which why the forests are still standing and not a neighborhood like the rest of the acreage surrounding the park.

As we were paying the greens fee we were told that the front 9 was cart path only and the back 9 was so wet you could only walk it or just play the front twice. That was disappointing, I had gotten used to playing at Harbourside which has little no issue with drainage problems at all.

Indian Boundary had a water problem there was standing water all over the front nine and even hitting your ball out of the fairway cut was sketchy. On more than a few occasions my club would get eaten up with soggy muck leading to the ball going a 1/10th of what a nice stoke and contact does in dry conditions.

It was hard to stay positive with course condition and fighting against the sun setting. It hurried up golf with landing good shots in the water and playing in marshland. The wet ground area also gave us an ungodly amount of Mosquitos that I was unprepared for and was super annoying. I have since purchased bug spray to get in my bag. I should probably get some sunscreen in there as well.

I don’t think I will make a trip back out to this course again. It is what it is and its a solid value play type of course that spending 25 bucks for a no thrills and not uber complicated course (weather permitting)

To be fair though as a group we did have some fun shots and the Skins game came down to wild 4 hole skin swing and take the lead on the last hole of the day.

Below was one of our shots on the 9th hole. I am trying out a new app that traces the shots. and does some cool graphics.

Posted on

Range Session 6/22/2019

Found myself with a spare 90 minutes and with the sun in the sky figured it would be nice to be hit some balls for the first time in a couple of weeks.

Due to the time crunch, I headed to the Jackson Park Driving Range.  This is a CPD driving range with about 45 very distress mats and a range that goes to I believe 250 yards.  It cost 13 dollars for a large bucket which is about the same as other large buckets I’ve purchased at the other ranges in the area.

It’s been a while since I picked up and swung a club for almost three weeks!  So I was nervous what my swing was going to look like and what my ball flight path was going to look like.  I was ultra nervous about hitting my driver, you never know where that ball is heading lol.

I started out with my usual starter club the 6 Iron.

My usual order of clubs is:

6i,4i,9i, PW, Driver, 52 degree Wedge

With the 52 degrees wedge, I will start with full swings than some 75% and lower to 50%.

I hit my 6 Iron really well and felt my glutes activating which meant I was hitting some pretty good distance. The distance and nice strokes continued through the Pitching wedge.  I even worked in some nice little baby fades #beautiful

Onto to the Driver… I was a little hesitant to pull this club out of the bag but, with how well I was hitting the other clubs I felt ready to crush it #GripandRipIt

From my earlier rounds this year and the trial and tribulations I’ve had with my new driver with the flexible shaft it has.  I had become very unbalanced and my hands were chasing the head of the club to compensate for my what I thought was a bad swing was really just the shaft doing its job.  After a couple of rounds with some experienced eyes, I was able to swing the club and make clean contact and stay balanced throughout the full golf swing.

Remembering my cues  to stay balanced and to keep my hands high on the down stroke to  give the head a chance to hit the ball square, I hit the first couple of balls well but the distance was lacking so I decided to turn up the power and really drive from the legs and see what a 100% swing produced.  Immediate chunked shot, followed by a topped ball that looked like one of those cool trick shot stingers you see on Instagram all the time.  I took a quick break and drilled a couple of practice swings making sure to hit all my points to be ultra sure I wasn’t dropping my hands.

The 1st swing after the practice shot was just straight pipped down the middle of the driving range and so did the next 2 shots. Now feeling super confident I decided to get very aggressive and swing my hardest and see what would happen.  The full power shot got crushed and went a little right and a little bit more draw than I would have liked but the ball went straight down the line and on a decent size fairway the ball would have been down the right side edge of the fairway or just little off on the first rough.  I hit a few more drives and then the ball started to pull left or I was closing the club head. I’d had enough of the driver and was ready to start hitting my targeted checked down wedge shots.

Conveniently my to 50 and 75 Yard are damn near my  50% and 75% shots which come in handy when trying to find a target on the range to hit to.  This is going to be my main interest in the upcoming range session is trying to dial in my wedge shots to help give me a better shot at eliminating 3 puts.  If I can land the ball within 12 feet of the hole from 85-35 yard away from the pin.  Would be nice to score some 1 puts holes as well.

Hopefully, this session will Kick start my interest in practicing more as it really is the only way to get better at playing golf.  My goal is to hit 3 rounds in a row under 96 before the end of the summer.

Might have the chance to play up in the Lake Geneva area this weekend, I’ll be going for low 90s. Wish me luck!

Posted on

Weekly Post 5/20/2019

Highlights:

  • A solid round of golf
  • 3 workout is a week streak continues

Lowlight:

  • This Weather

I’m really happy that I’ve been able to keep up with all these  3 a week work out schedules.  I do seem to be front-loading my workouts in the beginning of the week which left me sore, so sore that I feel it is smart move to not hit the gym and rest up towards the end of the week.  My schedule has opened up on Thursday evenings but if go Monday- Tuesday rest Wednesday then hit it at the remaining of the work week.

This will increase my workouts from 3 to 4 a week.  I wonder if I will be able to handle that extra volume,  but I am eager to try it out.  I have a plan I will try it out for one week where I will push my self to get that 4th in and see how I feel on the next week and if I can’t make it to all 4 so be it I will regroup and wait a week to try it again.

This will mean that my diet will also have to improve as the Mcdonalds it still pretty prevalent and so are other similar types of restaurants.  I have already started pre-cooking breakfast consisting of 2 eggs and 2 bacon pieces which have helped me fix binge eating at lunch.  Maybe I can move to meal prepping some lunches as well to help curve the need to go out for lunch every day.

It is nice to get out of work for that 45 minutes or so and relax and let the mind rest before that afternoon stacked of work slaps me in the face as soon as I walk into the office. So I assume slow progress on bringing lunch to the office until I can find a way to escape for lunch but not eat out.

Onto the Thursday golf round.

My friend was able to snag a great deal on a 9:30 am tee time.  It was little hairy having skipped out on work but hey the weather was nice and I like to golf so #treatyourself We played Portside at Harborside and I was determined to figure out how to swing my new driver. This one of my favorite parts about Playing at Harborside is that you feel like you can use your diver 16 times a round.

My buddy noticed that my Driver swing was all out of whack, I was way off balance. I was falling forward after my seeing unable to hold a pose. This is the first time I have experienced this type to a fault in my swing. After some video of my swing, I wasn’t able to see any major faults as to why my body was falling forward after my follow through.  He gave me a cue just to “be an athlete and swing the club” for whatever reason that helped me a ton.

I think just trying to be concise of where my weight was and when the shift happened with my new flexible shaft.  It looked like my arms were coming way to low and adjusting my center of gravity forward causing me to fall forward because I was trying to chase the swing rather than use the flex to my advantage.

It took 5 or 6 holes for me to realize this and then a couple more to get my arms back on a nice swing plane but once I did it felt very comfortable now its time to get to the range and practice, practice, practice to get that muscle memory locked in.  If I can get off the tee better my golf game should improve by at least 3 to 5 strokes.

My long iron game is definitely the strongest part of my game so that is why I believe this new driver will make such a difference to my scorecard.

Have a great week!

Posted on

Weekly Summary 5/13/2019

High Lights:

  • Friday afternoon golf
  • 3 workouts

Lowlights:

  • Addicted to Mcdonalds…again

On the fitness front, I’m happy to report that I logged 3 workouts this week and would have had a fourth if it wasn’t so nice out on Friday. It was so nice that my brother texted me right after lunchtime to see if I wanted to golf. That was very fast yes and we booked a tee time at my “home” course Harborside International. It was low 70s all day and sunny all day so we were eager to get out and hit some balls.

The traffic was dreadful and made us late for our 2:50 tee time. Luckily the course was pretty open so we were able to jump on the 3:40 tee time which was putting us pretty close to finishing right at sunset so we had to be on our horses to get all 18 holes in before the sunset.

I’m beginning to hit my driver a little bit better, but my drives are not at the level as my old driver. As it turns out I was actually planning to go get some serous swings in at the driving range before I got the ca to play 18. So at least i’m trying to get some practice in lol.

I will need to start getting some drills in for my golf swing while I’m at home watching tv. I like to do them on the commercial breaks to cater to my short attention span.

The weather does seem to be turning but this rain will not quit especially in e the weekends. Whatever i’ll just keep trying to get on the course when my schedule allows it.

Posted on

Weekly Summary 4/1/2019

High Lights:

  • 1st Round of the year!
  • New Bed

Low Lights:

  • Lack of workouts
  • still eating like a pig

Cantigny Golf course

Last week there was a solid Saturday Afternoon that was low 50s and sunny.  Was able to snatch a 2:10 tee time at Cantigny Played a solid round with a couple of buddies and one of their friends for an almost chilly kick off round of the season.

I shot under 100 for and hit that ball pretty well off tee. As usual, my short game got the better of me especially 50 yards and under.  I can’t wait to focus on that in practice this year.  It should shave at least 6 strokes off my game easy.

Other big news was that for the first time out of the hotel, I am sleeping in a King size bed.  What a game changer to have all that room.  I had been having trouble falling asleep once in bed for a while now.  I tried a lot of things like blue light glasses and not looking at my phone after 9:00 PM.  Since I started sleeping on it I’ve fallen asleep super fast and stayed asleep which is always a good thing.

Looking forward to next week I’m going to keep logging my food and hit the gym 3 times this week.  Working on portion control might be easier than a stricter diet.

Cheers to another productive week.

 

 

 

Posted on

Weekly Summary 2/17/2019

High Lights:

  • Valentines Day Dinner
  • 5 Days with no Alcohol

Low Lights:

  • Not Enough Lifting
  • Eat like a pig

This Chicago Winter is really starting to drag on.  Maybe I need to take a serious dose of Vitamin D to bring up my spirits and get a little pep back in my step.

I attempted to get my golf fix after watching what seemed to be 30 straight hours straight of golf this Saturday and Sunday with all the weather delays at the Gennnisss Open in California pushing rounds 2,3,4 into two days.   This task proved to be harder than I thought it would for living in downtown Chicago. There is only 1 place in the loop to my knowledge and when I called at  2:20 pm they were booked full for the rest of the day. 🙁  This might be a special case since it is a 3-day weekend for President Day.

I will try and go to this location during this next week to see if this is something I would get into,  it is kind of expensive at $50 an hour, but hey they do valet your car for 4 hours for only 10 dollars.  I will break that experience down in a dedicated blog later this week.

On the fitness side of this week, I went out way to hard in a workout on Tuesday that had a wild amount of pull-ups that basically blew my lats out.  This was a scary feeling as I can’t remember a time when my lats were ever sore.  That put me out of commission for a few days, but I did go to a Yoga class to help stretch things out.  Having not been sure if I had really hurt myself or just needed a few days to let them recuperate and took advantage of my buildings Gym and did some light lifting and some short cardio.

I should be finishing up my Current audiobook titled Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss and Thal Raz.  This has been a fun listen so far, I wish I could dedicate more time to actively listen to this book.  It really is worth a read/listen.

Any recommendations on what I should read next??

 

Cheers