Project Par Week 6 Update

Slow Start, Fast Speed, and a Little Spill

Welcome Players! Shaking off the Colombian pace was no easy task, but I got it done. This week was marked by a slow start in practicing and culminated in a sprained wrist from a fall while cycling. Shit happens. But I’m proud to say none of these things held me back and I finished the week strong with a decent posting of a round at Miami Springs. Read on to see how things unfolded.

Contents:

• Training Week in Review

• Habit Tracker

• Training Log

• Physiology Metrics

• Skill Practice

• Golf Performance

• Wrap-Up

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Training Week in Review

This sums up how my week started after returning from Colombia refreshed and ready to roll - or so I thought.

Monday was rough. It had me in the first half, not gonna lie.

But that’s what happens in life. You go on vacation, come back, and then just close your eyes and teleport to a mountainside finca sipping freshly brewed coffee. *WAKES UP*. Yea, Monday was a struggle.

Tuesday was tough too. But I told myself, It’s ok to start slow. But we’re gonna finish fast. Gotta pick it up here and get some momentum rolling. Something, anything to get the ball moving.

And by the end of the week I was flying down the boardwalk on a 20+ mile bike ride for conditioning when my front tire went over a little too much sand drifting over from the beach and flew out from underneath sending me crashing to the pavement.

I was fine (I ALWAYS wear a helmet!) - until the next day when I woke up with my wrist pretty sore. I undoubtedly sprained it. Feels like either the TFCC or lateral ligaments. But that didn’t stop me either. Played a solid round on Friday and doubled-down on home-practice Saturday & Sunday.

Start slow, finish fast!

Let’s get into it.

Habit Tracker

As you can see, dropping a goose-egg on Monday was a wake-up call. Not on vacation any more.

Tuesday was the fire-starter. Do something, anything to move forward. Forced myself into a weak 20-minute putting session at night.

Wednesday was better, feeding off of Tuesday’s start and shaking off the Tuesday-Scaries¹ I got a much more focused putting session in.

Thursday I made it to the driving range to hit a bucket of balls and start to get back into things. Wasn’t the greatest practice round but being back on a course felt good and by now I was back into Project Par mode.

Friday was able to get away and play a round while Saturday and Sunday was spent chipping foam balls around my apartment.

Wins: Finished fast! Practice time picked up, lots of time spent with a club in my hand, and playing a round on Friday.

Losses: Started slow. Severely neglected my putting practice in lieu of chipping. This is a common theme where I am just not practicing more than one skill at a time.

Training Log

In order of day completed I did the following for physical training:

37. Rest

38. 35-min home yoga

39. RT session

40. 2-hour cycling ride

41. Rest

42. Rest

43. 3-hour cycling ride

Wins: I absolutely crushed my conditioning sessions this week. A great 2-hour ride during the week and a monster 3-hour, 37-mile ride on Sunday morning. Felt really good to push long distances in Zone 2 HR. I can feel the difference cycling is having on both my everyday mood/attitude but also how I feel after and during a round of golf. The home-yoga is also serving me really well in the sense that I know I am making progress even by doing a half-hour of work at home.

Losses: Like I mentioned it was a little bit of a slower week than what I would have wanted, and ideally would have at least one more RT session in there.

Physiology Metrics

The three main physiological metrics I track are Heart Rate (HR), Heart Rate Variability via rMSSD (HRV), and Sleep Opportunity (SO).²

Quick legend: Gray bars are daily scores, blue line is trend line, and green range is moving average.

In physiological terms I had a great week.

Resting Heart Rate stayed at the bottom edge of my range, HRV stayed right in the middle of baseline, and aside from two consecutive nights of a little less time in bed my sleep opportunity was well managed.

A lot of talk is usually centered around how our physiology responds when we’re feeling good or at optimal work capacity, but I find it interesting to also look at the physiology metrics especially in weeks like these where my subjective feeling is below-optimal yet by all objective accounts things are all-clear.

It highlights the importance of using HRV and intrinsic data as safety-checks against how you feel and the external environment.

Skill Practice

This was my first range-session of the week. It was relaxed, free flowing, and really my goal was just to get back swinging a club again with solid contact seeing as I hadn’t hit balls since before I left for Colombia.

Not much comment here, not all practice sessions will contain revelations and drastic improvements. Just putting in the reps.

You’ll see in the next section how I played in the round following this practice. I actually struck my irons really really well (comparatively for me) and was smoking my 5-wood which I play as a 3-wood. But my misses were all from chipping, another common theme, and so that’s what spurred intensive chipping practice at home with foam balls over the weekend.

Continuing to try and stack progress and reconcile gains.

Golf Performance

On Friday I played at Miami Springs Golf Course & Country Club for the first time. A nicer course than I thought it was marked by plenty of space, easy misses, and elevated greens.

I played really well on the front nine shooting a 46 with a birdie in there!

The back nine was a different story, logging five triple-bogey’s.

Also a big note here, we left after 15 holes because it was starting to get dark and the pace of play was slow. In order to calculate out my scores I predicted my score on the hole based off my handicap & hole difficulty. This assumes I would have finished bogey, double-bogey, bogey, which I’m fine with. What I couldn’t adjust in the stat tracker was the fairway accuracy because it automatically enters a “hit” fairway and there’s no way to adjust that, so my stats will be a little skewed from it.

Stat review:

• 1 birdie

• 3 GIR

• Four fairways hit = ~27%

• 7 misses right, 2 misses left, 1 shank

• Four 3-putts

• 40 putts

It was a good round! I should have posted better scores, especially on the back nine, but I will be honest that I wasn’t playing with the intent to compete. I was enjoying myself with a good friend playing golf. I still took it seriously, don’t get me wrong, but I wasn’t as concentrated as I would have been had I dedicated the round to let’s say a 3-month evaluation round. Overall things continue to improve, and it was this round that spurred my home-chipping practice because of how many chunks I had with easy approaches to the green.

Wrap-Up

It was a bit of a hodge-podge kind of week. There was a slow start, a sprained wrist, an uptick in practice at the end of the week and an almost-complete round to take away thoughts from.

Overall I’m going to view this as a positive week in the sole sense that I didn’t let the slow pace drag on through the week and was able to turn things around.

Like our friend in the intro said, it’s OK to start slow. It’s OK to not be on your A-game. It’s OK not to be at your best.

But it’s not OK to give up. Keep going, do the things you need to do to fill your bucket and take care of yourself so that you can get back on the horse.

Progress waits for no one.

See you next week!

1. Yea I know they usually call it the Sunday-Scaries, but when your freshly back from vacation every day is scary.

2. To learn more about Heart Rate Variability and the physiology metrics I track, click here