Unless you fall in to the category of independently wealthy or you live alone, every so often, you need to take a break from the game and head out for a weekend with the family. If you haven’t experienced “golf overload” yet, it’s a rather special feeling of spending entirely too much time looking at, talking about and trying to play golf. When your social media feeds have more photos of courses than your kids (or things you are doing with your kids) then you are probably due for a weekend away with them – even if you are independently wealthy. That doesn’t mean you can’t make that stay-cation into a golf excursion as well, but make sure you take some time to get away from the game every once in a while, even if it’s just a weekend.
Being a player in the Pacific Northwest, we get a forced vacation from the game a few times a year, usually in the winter and spring, but even our fall season can get a bit wet during October and November. Our season actually sets up quite nicely here in Washington, as we normally have good enough conditions to play all year around, but not conditions that would make you want to go out and play all year around. January is usually cold and clear, as is February. March rains a bit more and April is a bit nicer. May is usually wet and in June the courses really start to become playable. July and August are usually the best months to play here, then September and October usually round out the season before the colder weather of November and December roll around. If it’s a dry winter though, you may have a few frost delays with your round, but our lack of lowland snow usually keeps courses playable. This is why it’s so easy to take a weekend away here, but it may not prove so easily where you are.
Even so, taking that weekend off will do a number of things for your game, most of them positive. First off, most athletes are used to the old, “When I miss a shot, I want the ball back as quick as I can get it to make the next one.” With basketball, that’s great, but with golf, sometimes you need a bit of a break to reset mentally and get your head game back together. When you have that bad round, you start to get so many different thoughts racing through your head that you forget your basics and start tinkering with things that don’t need to be tinkered with. After a month of tinkering, your game is in worse shape than ever. Instead of just taking a weekend away to relax and unwind, you end up trashing your next 10 rounds by overthinking things. Mental note: take time off…
Overthinking your round, or even the shot you have in front of you can be deadly to your game. If you just relax and trust your swing it will usually be there. That includes after a week away from the game to take the family to some crazy place they’ve always wanted to go. The bottom line is a weekend away won’t harm your game, in fact, it may help it immensely. Sometimes the one thing you need to get out of a swing or scoring funk is to just step away for a few minutes before you step back in and try to fix something. Most of the time, it’s our brains getting in the way. We tend to get caught up in thinking about what we should be doing, instead of just doing it.
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