I am extremely happy with this weeks score. By far the best league round of the season and the casual golf as well. With a score of 103, that’s 4 strokes better than my last two rounds.
I achieved that by keeping the same ball all the way through the 15th hole. I was able to retrieve the ball from the water twice. I only lost the ball on great shot on the 14th, it was one of those lost balls that should have been smack dab in the middle of the fairway. That lead to me scoring a 9 on that hole that really broke my confidence for the rest of the round. It was a real fight to not let all the come off. But that manifested in 3 putting all the reaming holes and topping 2 of the 3 tee shots.
My putting on this was way off, I kept leaving them way short. I think it was the pressure of having a check to score some par and bogey that got in my head and through of my usual solid putting game.
I am starting to trend in the right direction and I feel that this weekly golf is helping a ton. Now if I could find some time and practice once a week maybe I could get another record low score. Time will tell but I’m gonna get after it as much as I can.
Shot of the day was monster 3 iron of the tee over a huge tree on the 4th hole which just missed both the fairways and the right-side bunker. I was able to get up and down and make par on the hole. This really catapulted my confidence for the next 11 holes until the 15th.
Now that I’m 100% in full work mode sleep is, even more, a premium than I’ve been stating in my earlier posts. With the 4th of July festivities, I missed out some opportunities to catch on some sleep, which I paid for later in the week. I guess that is just got to get used to this new lifestyle.
I only was able to catch the last quarter part of the Navy Pier Fireworks show. Good counter pint to missing out on most of the fireworks was that I basically walked in on the grand finale so glass half full thinking here for sure.
Was able to get on the course twice this week, both of the rounds were at Jackson Park. First-round was with the league, showed some improvement from the first week. Full recap available here
Second round the week was last minute. My brother texted around 7:30 am on Sunday just as I was trying to figure out if I had time to hit the range and get some practice in while the family was taking their morning laps. We were able to make a 9:15 tee time and were coupled with a couple of good guys there were out there with the same mindset – golfing with a few beers and couple laughs. I shot another 107 for the second time this week. Definitely jacked up for next weeks league because I can feel my course management is starting to match my gameplay which should shave a few strokes even when my swing isn’t playing nice.
The shot of the day came on the last tee shot where I was able to drive the green on the 18th hole. The drive left me about 18 feet from the hole. Yes, I three-putted for par on that hole.
1st shot of the 18th Hole rolled up to the green
Hopefully, I can keep playing and improve at this pace for the rest of the season. Would really make this season that much more enjoyable and help with the staying on task during this offseason.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
Super elated to say that the baby was released from the ICN and is home now. Now the real game starts. up until now the nurses and doctors were always there to care for the child. There is no backup squad anymore it’s up to us now. There have already been some long nights and lots of diaper and lots of crying but We will all get better at this new situation. Everything is so new and once we can get into a routine I’m sure life be a little less chaotic and gain a little more order(fingers crossed).
I will have to head back to work soon and I am not looking forward to leaving the baby at home with Mom. The baby is a lot of work and I wouldn’t like to be there and help as much as I can. 10-12 diapers a day and consistent feeding really do take a toll especially if you mix in that lack of sleep. that a tough go for a one person team.
The lack of sleep has increased my Mocha intake. I haven’t been counting but I’m at least up to 1.25 a day average. I’ve even been asking for an extra shot of espresso in there as well #yikes Will need to keep an eye out for that caffeine intake but right now I just got me up and alert for both Mom and the Baby plus they taste so good…
Time to get back to the Eat-Sleep-Shit-Mocha routine. #loveit
Pretty monumental week for me and my Family. On June 3rd, 2019 my wife gave birth to our first child. Happy to report that both the baby and my wife are happy and healthy. The baby is spending some time in the NICU and ICN but all tests and results are trending the right way and are looking to bring the little guy home soon.
Sleep has been nonexistent. But wow is it wild to hold YOUR brand new baby. So light, fragile, and mushy lol very hard to explain the barrage of waves of emotions I have experienced in the past week. A switch has been turned on inside me and “Dad Mode” has been engaged.
I’m going to try and keep the baby off the blog and stay away from including him into the social media for as long as I can. When I Started this blog it was about my journey to enjoy the game of golf and my life around it and how they intermixed. I still plan to stay to the framework but I expect my free time to practice and play golf as much as I did before but for right now I’m ok with that.
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.
The workout streak is still on fire and I was even able to squeeze a 4 round in. This weeks format was exercise Monday, Tuesday rest Wednesday and work out again Thursday, Friday.
MDW is for sure in my top holidays of the year. I have a lot of good quality memories around this powerful Monday and long weekend. Traditionally my family has grilled on Sundays. Though I didn’t get to spend this Sunday with my family I was able to spend it with some close friends and their 3-month-old baby. To celebrate We picked put some Prime Ribeyes from Marianos. Quick side note Marianos has some great meat if you have one near and are into grilling they are a must to check out.
My body definitely feels the 4 workouts I completed this week, but I was able to do it and my body did not fall apart lol. Hopefully, I will be able to keep this up and build some stamina and get my cardio back up the level of my younger years. I can say that all this Olympic lifting has helped my CNS fatigue I encounter playing 18 holes of golf. If I can stay sharper deeper into the round maybe I will avoid those dreaded blow out holes that usually happen around the 11th or 14th hole.
