You may be wondering what happened to day 1! Well I only decided this morning that it would be a good idea to do a daily update on how much I've been practicing and other fitness activities to help me see how good I can get in 2010. Also I am cheating a bit by starting in 2009, but it's only a few days! :-)
The weather here in the UK has been horrible over Christmas. I woke today to find it lashing down with rain meaning no chance of getting out on the course. Todays rain itself isn't the problem, it's the waterlogged ground from all the melted snow that we've had. I can't wait for the warmer weather to come although this could be 4-5 months away! Anybody have a villa in Spain they'd like to donate to me?!
I was very happy to wake up without feeling any real pain in my lower back. I was expecting to have to take more ibuprofen today but it seems the stretching and hitting balls down the range yesterday has helped loosen things up. Just before lunch I headed back to the range again, this time with my driver added to my PW and 7 iron. I started again with lots of stretching and warming up before hitting lots of chips and pitches with my wedge. Slowly moving on to the 7 iron and then 5 balls with my driver. The drives were all over the place to start with but I think this was because I was swinging as gently as I could just to make sure I over did it. Things got straighter and although I didn't hit one at 110% it was a great feeling to be hitting good drives again.
Of course hitting balls at the range is just a small part of what I'm going to have to do over 2010. I have had a gym membership for around 18 months now and I've probably been less that 30 times. I was close to cancelling it just before Christmas but I'm going to keep it going now as this golf challenge it going to require a lot of fitness and strength work - things I've never really concentrated on before while playing golf.
Today was just a gentle start at the gym. 20 minutes on the bike, and 10 minutes running. We've got to start somewhere and I don't want to overdo things and pull a muscle. I've been doing stretches at least 3 times a day from the book
Golf Rx: A 15-Minute-a-Day Core Program for More Yards and Less Pain
. I'll cover this book in more detail in a later post as it has been difficult to find a book that has golf specific exercises.
I'm also going to keep track of various interesting stats at the bottom of each daily update. So far we have 2 stats to track :-)
Total range balls hit : 100
Time spent in gym : 0.5 hours