Category Archives: Golf

Keto keto keto keto keto …

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keto breakfast

So I’m resigned to the fact that I will never be able to take really pretty food pictures. But this is what a typical breakfast looks like–just pretend it is has starbursts and stuff.

No, I am not jumping on a fad.

I already jumped–a year ago!

And before I jumped, I already had a nice foundation in place: I’d been doing intermittent fasting for 3 or 4 years before that …

Okay. Being a writer, I could spin out 6000 words on this topic without drawing a breath, so I’ll try to keep it short.

Here’s what happened.

Back in the late 90s/early 2000s I used low carb to slim back down after having a baby. But I thought of it, back then, as a way to lose weight, not as a way to improve other health markers. So after a few months I went back to eating the way I had before.

“The way I’d been eating before” wasn’t the so-called SAD (Standard American Diet) diet fwiw. I haven’t eaten that way since high school. I got on a “whole foods” kick in my early 20s and have been refining it ever since. But it did include quite a few carbs: grains with every meal, desserts (organic ice cream, that sort of thing). Lots of fruit.

But four or five years ago something happened that raised a red flag for me.

It was a busy Saturday. I was out running errands. I hadn’t eaten in several hours–one of those days when eating takes a back seat to other priorities.

I stopped at a Starbucks and ordered a mocha coffee–i.e. sugar laden high carb treat.

And a couple hours later, I crashed. Shaky, nauseous, weak, light-headed–I felt horribly sick.

It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling. I’d been a “grazer” for a long time, with good reason: I couldn’t go more than 3 or 4 hours without eating, or I’d start to feel those symptoms.

But the intensity of the experience shook me up.

I wasn’t obese. I was working out (weight training) twice a week. But I was carrying probably 10 or 15 extra pounds. That, combined with my sugar crash, was a wake-up call. If I was having this kind of a reaction to sugar now, what was I facing in 5 years, or 10, or 15? Were the extra pounds I had put on as I aged affecting me in ways that were slowly undermining my health? Was my diet really the best diet for me?

I’m a regular reader of the “primal living” health blog at Mark’s Daily Apple, so by then I’d come across a term Mark Sisson coined: “fat-burning beast.” The basic idea is one that keto fans will find familiar. You can train your body to burn fat for energy instead of glucose, and when you do, you break your dependency on carbs. You won’t experience sugar crashes any more. You won’t have to eat all the time any more.

This was before Keto diets were all the rage, but I knew that day that I needed to become a fat-burning beast.

I started intermittent fasting.

There are a lot of different ways to do intermittent fasting. The approach I picked was to fast for 24 hours, breakfast to breakfast, twice a week.

It was really hard at first. More than once I’d hit a wall about 2 in the after noon. My body temp would drop, my energy levels would plummet. I’d have to crawl into bed under the covers to warm up and sleep just to get through it. (Working from home helps!)

But after a few months, my body adapted and holy smokes, what a revelation.

I was no longer dependent on food!

Guys, you know I’m a golfer. I used to have to pack food with me when I golfed so that I could get through a 4-5 hour round without wanting to pass out. Now, all of a sudden, it didn’t matter. I could go out in the morning without eating breakfast and play a round without the slightest discomfort.

And needless to say, no more sugar crashes. And I lost a few pounds which felt good.

Then came the Keto thing. Sisson started blogging about it. He announced he had a book coming out.

I didn’t hesitate. I pre-ordered the book and as soon as it arrived started planning a 6-week Keto clean-out.

That was a year ago. This week, my sweetheart and I are doing the 6-week thing for the second time :)

To me, Keto delivers the same effects as fasting. Energy levels that are both high and steady; clear mind; body gets that lovely, compact feeling (versus the bloated feeling I get when I’ve been eating too many carbs).

We also found that the effects of a six-week Keto clean-out last–really for the whole rest of the year. I still fast from time to time but it’s more of a touch-point now. Being “keto-adapted,” I don’t ever need to eat (freedom!!!) Going 24 or even 48 hours without eating doesn’t faze me. I energizer bunny right through :)

It also kind of pulled our diet in a keto direction even though we didn’t bother staying in “strict keto” once the six weeks was up. If I was at a restaurant and they put out fresh Italian bread with olive oil, I’d eat a slice and enjoy it. OTOH if I was hungry for a burger I’d order it without a bun. I.e. I didn’t seek out carbs, but I didn’t shun them.

Keto is definitely a fad today, with all the hoopla you get with diet fads. People denouncing it as dangerous, blah blah blah. Or defining keto erroneously (“you eat pounds of meat every day! and no veggies!” yeah right…) and then clapping themselves on the back for knocking their straw man over.

Silly. Not even going to bother engaging on that stuff. Go read Sisson if you want thoughtful, in-depth, science-based considerations of dietary arguments.

What I also see a lot of is people who–let me put this nicely–need a bit of help understanding how to do it.

So at the risk of turning this post into an all-Sisson read: I really recommend Sisson’s book, The Keto Reset Diet: Reboot Your Metabolism in 21 Days and Burn Fat Forever (affiliate link).

Actually, let me amend that: if you are thinking about doing keto for the first time, just go buy the book.

Because it’s about preparing yourself for keto. And you owe it to yourself to build a foundation if you’re new to keto–and especially if you are like I was: the sort of person who needs to eat every couple of hours to keep your energy levels steady.

Going keto “cold turkey” can make you feel like crap. Just like I felt that day years ago when I sugar crashed from my mocha coffee.

But if you prepare your body, things will be easier. And if you have a framework–a little bit of the science–you’ll understand what you’re doing and how to do it right.

Plus the book has a bunch of recipes and we found most of them to be absolutely delicious. So there’s that, too–you can plan your menus without having to hunt for ideas.

Happy ketoing!

NaNoWriMo is here!!!

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Set my alarm for 5 a.m. cuz if I don’t make extra time for this in the morning no way am I going to keep up :-)

Here’s my opening sentence. YES it’s rough — it’s supposed to be! But I don’t care, I’m so excited :-)

Most suppose golf is about life, not death—it is, after all, supremely difficult to manage a golf shot while dead—but death had been very much on the minds of the members of Crumbling Bluffs County Club the past few weeks, ever since Sly Burbank’s body had been found off to the side of the 4th fairway. And it was on their minds that night in particular, because they’d learned, that night, the results from the coroner’s inquest.

NaNo on, dudes!!!!!!!!!!

Golf in snowtime

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I’m taking a few golf lessons. Yes, in February, in Upstate New York, where a heat wave = temps in the 20s.

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 . . .

golf blog

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Late last night, after a negotiating a harrowing technological labyrinth on and off for several days, I managed to upgrade to the latest WordPress version on my golf blog, Golfolicious.

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 :-)

The chief difficulty . . .

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Another (oh too short!) golf trip last weekend, this time to Florida.

We were startled our first day out when a gigundous bird flew over — low, buzzed us, just above our heads.

We got a better look on Saturday when we played Victoria Hills (in Deland, near Orlando). Turns out they are Sand Hill Cranes. Here’s three of them strolling the 12th green.

sandhill cranes

sandhill crane

They weren’t very afraid of people, so I was able to get some nice close shots too. It was funny to see them on the course like that, too. Got me to thinking . . . that head . . . I could probably putt with that guy . . . then again, maybe not . . .

The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away: besides all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted to send the hedgehog to, and, as the doubled-up soldiers were always getting up and walking off to other parts of the ground, Alice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed.

:-)

More pics of the course on my golf blog.

Bould (ered) Over

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Break in posting because I spent a few days over last weekend on a delightful golf vacation in Carefree, Arizona — a bit north of Scottsdale.

The Boulders Resort Arizona

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.

A boulder at The Boulders Resort in Arizona

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.

The Boulders Resort lodge

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

The Boulders Resort view from our casita

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?

Quail

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.

jack rabbit

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

Boulders Resort Nature trail

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 . . .

Full moon in Arizona

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! :-)