But in some respects winter is a good time to take lessons, especially if you’re in my situation. I have an old swing habit I have to break once and for all: my left wrist bows at the top of my swing. Bowing one’s left wrist, it turns out, does unmentionable things to one’s club face angle. It also makes it very hard to get the club face back to square at impact. I manage to square the face — sometimes — via a little loop at the top of my swing, kind of like Jim Furyk’s — except unlike Jim Furyk’s mine isn’t particularly repeatable.

So my game had plateaued. I’d managed to whittle my handicap down from the mid-30s a few years ago to around 20, but then I got stuck. I wasn’t hitting enough fairways, wasn’t keeping my ball in play enough with my fairway woods and long irons. Yeah, I know, the easiest way to shave strokes off your score is by working on your short game. Or so goes the “conventional wisdom” whatever that is. Although you may have caught the Golf Magazine article last fall that mentioned than in a typical round, someone who shoots in the 90s wastes six strokes on what a Columbia Business School Professor (Mark Broadie, unofficial title: 4-handicap numbers geek) calls “awful shots” — meaning anything that “advances the ball less than 80 yards,” “results in a penalty,” or “forces a recovery shot.”

Yeah, I see me losing six strokes a round that way, easy.

The worst part, by far, is that I was getting frustrated, and it was taking some of the fun out of playing–and golfing is one of my favorite things to do.

Not good.

So I took some money out of savings and am letting Rob Horak (he used to be the pro at Blue Heron Hills; he’s now at Golftec) pull my swing apart to re-build some better fundamentals. And since it’s February in Rochester, I can’t be tempted to take any of it out on the course. Which is a good thing, because on the course I’d surely backslide. Better off standing in my living room swinging, over and over and over again, at nothing . . .

Time will tell if this is the fix I needed to straighten out my long game.

But in the meantime, I realized something about myself, and my brain, and the way I learn.

I don’t have any idea if I’m alone in this, but I have trouble mapping visuals correctly back to physical actions.

As one example. I’d forgotten this, but I struggled as a kid with learning my right hand from my left. What finally saved me was learning to write. When it was time for the Pledge of Allegiance, I imagined picking up a pencil.  Then I would know which was my right hand.

To this day, I bet if you showed me a photograph of someone with one hand raised, and asked me which hand it was, I’d be unable to answer until I had mentally turned myself around (so I’d be facing the same direction as the person in the photo) and “matched” the raised hand with mine. Writing hand, right. Non-writing hand, left.

And guess where I’ve gotten virtually all of my information in the past five years about what makes a “good golf swing”?

Pictures. The pros on television, pictorials in the golf magazines.

It’s comical, the results, now that I see what I did. I’d constructed a mental model that was basically backwards–the way my body executed part of my swing (the top of it) was backwards. And it worked, part of the time–because I’m a good enough athlete that I could compensate, with my hands, for the shenanigans in my swing–but it had that little goofiness built in, the laying off of the club and the little loop to bring it back that I couldn’t even feel, because I thought I was doing what I saw in the pictures.

So yeah. I’m weird.

Now, fingers crossed, I can smooth out at least a little of my weirdness before the courses open back up this spring . . .

Keuka is one of the prettiest Finger Lakes, and is also where my mom spent part of her childhood :-)

It shouldn’t have been hard. I’ve put up a half dozen WordPress sites at this point; for the installation, my preference is Fantastico, an application deployment tool bundled with many hosting services. You pretty much click a button and you’re done. Even better, when it’s time to upgrade, you can use the same tool.

My Golfolicious WordPress instance, however, wasn’t originally installed using Fantastico — so I hesitated trying to use the tool to upgrade.

I could have done a manual upgrade, but the instructions published in the WordPress codex were long, complex, and included steps that I would have had to research further to fully understand.

Finally, I hit on another idea. I own the .net and .org versions of the domain name, as well as the .com. Maybe I could install a current version on the .net, transfer my theme, posts, and comments over, and then point the .com to the .net when I was done?

Call that plan B. Plan A, executed only when I’d done enough research on Plan B to satisfy myself that it was viable, was to try Fantastico.

I did. Didn’t work. Broke the site. Took me awhile to backtrack enough to make it somewhat usable again.

Plan B, OTOH, worked like a charm — particularly since the WordPress Wizards, my heroes, have built in handy import/export tools that make it extremely simple to transfer posts & comments between blogs/URLs/host servers.

Is there anything they haven’t thought of?

I heart WordPress!

And while I’m at it, I also heart Hostgator, my hosting service. Their chat tech support staff are awesome. They are patient, they are cheerful, they take the initiative to do a little extra research if needed to make sure an issue is resolved satisfactorily — my experience with them has really been top notch.

So thanks for all your help as I wrestled through that upgrade, Hostgator!

Now I need to catch up on golf blog posts. I put one up after I finished the upgrade last night — post about a late June trip to play a couple of courses at the Turning Stone resort. Scroll down to see my photo of a wild turkey :-)

It was idyllic. We stayed at The Boulders Resort, and I’ve never felt so pampered in my life. Turns out that was no accident. I flipped through some literature about the resort in our room (excuse me, our “casita”–the guest rooms are freestanding adobe buildings linked by winding sidewalks, and accessed by golf carts rather than cars) and it described the resort’s service philosophy. They’ve got a detailed service credo and everyone who works there goes through extensive training, including role playing so they’ll know how to handle guests’ needs. It sure shows. Right from the little things, like the way all the staff greet you by name and make lots of eye contact. You really do feel like a guest, not a customer.

It was also amazingly beautiful. The resort was built in 1985 on 1300 acres and according to one of the staff we chatted with, the architect spent weeks onsite, camping in various spots, in order to figure out how to situate its buildings and facilities. The end result is divine: everything is worked into the landscape–instead of interrupting nature, the buildings and sidewalks and access roads flow with it. You feel like you’re in a different world. At least this northeasterner did :-)

Anyway, here are some pics of the resort, starting with the main lodge. This is taken from across the fairway of the 6th hole of the resort’s south course. The lodge isn’t that far from the main north/south highway to the resort (Scottsdale Road/N. Tom Darlington) but you wind all through the resort to get to it. Then you leave your car with them–it’s valet all the way after that since you can’t access the rooms with a car.

Here’s what it looked like from our room when we woke in the morning.

We had a west-facing patio so the sun would light up that mountain every a.m. We were told we might see wild pigs, coyotes, and maybe a bobcat coming up through the wash back there, but we never saw anything bigger than a quail.

Speaking of quail, they were all over the place. Calling to each other constantly from alongside the fairways when we played. I never got a really good pic of them unfortunately. Once they realized you were approaching them, they’d quick dart behind a rock or bit of brush. Aren’t they cute, though, with their little feather pompadours?

I had better luck with the jackrabbits, especially this one, who sat still for me right next to our cart on our last day. They loooove the grass on the tee boxes.

Here’s another view of one of the Boulders boulders :-)

Isn’t that pretty? I took the shot from the resort’s nature trail, which loops around from the lodge to the courses’ club house and tennis courts and back.

Like I said, it was idyllic. As I write this post, we’re getting buried in the season’s first serious snow storm. Hard to believe that a week ago I was snapping a pic of a full moon, dressed in nothing heavier than a fall coat . . .

Now, give me a day or two, and I’ll post some more pics over at my golf blog. We tried four different area courses and I shot the best round of my life! :-)

Rochester region EWGA chapter tournament, played at Ravenwood yesterday. I shot a 101 and took low gross for my flight.

I’m a happy camper :-)

Cross-posted at Golfolicious.

Last fall, around the time it got too cold to golf anymore, I was feeling pretty discouraged about the game.

It seemed to me that after a year & a half of playing I should have been getting better. Ha. I was as close to breaking 100 at the end of 2006 as I was last fall. What’s worse, my swing was still a mystery to me. I couldn’t really understand what made it work or not work.

I’m slowly beginning to understand the mechanics. Slowly because there’s so much to it. This is nothing other golfers don’t already know, but for a golf swing to work, it has to be incredibly precise. A teensy spot on the face of the club has to hit a teensy spot on that little golf ball at precisely the right angle and velocity. And for that to happen, muscles throughout the body, from the pads of the feet through the core to the fingertips have to coordinate their movements within miniscule tolerances. It’s hard.

Or is it? What’s been maddening me is that I’ve always been able to hit the ball well sometimes. Incredibly long straight drives or perfectly gorgeous iron shots — pitches that arc up, drop near the hole and stick. Maddening, because if I could do it once, you’d think I could do it over and over.

Anyway, I finally returned to an old “friend,” Timothy Gallwey. I’d read his book The Inner Game of Tennis when I was in high school — I wasn’t a tennis player but somebody (was it you, Dad?) recommended it — I applied it (as best a self-conscious teenager could) to my basketball game.

This time, natch, I’m reading The Inner Game of Golf.

Here’s an Amazon affiliate link, so if you want to buy a copy I’ll get, um, 15 cents or something.

My copy is the 1981 hardcover edition btw, which means I got this “screamin’ 70s” pic of Gallwey on the back cover.

I don’t want to write too much about this yet, because doing so might make it harder to apply what I’m learning. But. The basic idea is that for a golf swing to really work there has to be an element of surrender. The “I” self that lives here, on the surface of things, has to take a back seat and allow That Something Else to swing the club.

I managed to do it fairly well on Monday — I played with my folks at Victor Hills East. What happened was almost spooky, in fact. I set my goal as “no more than 6 strokes per hole.” For the first three holes I got exactly 6 strokes on each hole (double bogeys on each). I was laughing at myself for meeting my goal so literally.

The next two holes are both par 3s; I shot a 5 and a 4 on them.

It was around the 6th hole that my concentration started to wobble a bit; I began to pay the wrong kind of attention to my game (“oh wow, I’m in the running to break 50″ kind of thinking) — shot an eight on 6 and a seven on 7.

And I realized: I just offset holes 4 & 5 so that my average is: 6 strokes a hole!

I bogeyed the next two holes, par 4s, to finish the front with 52 — not great, but a good 10 strokes lower than what I would have shot a week ago.

It didn’t last. I lost my focus through most of the back 9, regaining it only on 17 (parred with 3 strokes) and 18 (par 5–bogeyed it). So my overall score was still higher than I would have liked. But I don’t really mind. When I took up this game again 23 months ago I did it in part because I wanted a competitive physical activity that I could pursue until I drop dead. But there was another reason: I wanted to apply what I’ve learned about Mind — learned since I was that self-conscious teen — to an activity that would feed it back to me in near real time. It could have been martial arts or something, but it’s golf. Now to see how far I can take it . . .