Sunday musings, 9/4/11. Crossfit and Golf
Sunday musings (thinking about golf)…
1) L1. “The Heir” is at Rogue, day 2 of his L1 cert. Good luck, Dan!
2) Caring. The golf ball does not care who you are. It moves in response to your effort, due equally to accuracy and power. In that way a golf ball is exactly like a bumper plate. The weight cares not for your identity. It reacts in an equally dispassionate manner to the accuracy and power that you apply.
We “attach” ourselves to a golf ball via the club, to a bumper plate via a bar. We apply force to each in a core to extremity vector, the relative success of our movement determined by our technique and our applied strength. Others have said that hitting a baseball is harder, and I could be convinced, but other than that it appears to me that some of our lifts (snatch, anyone?) are as technical and demanding as any full-swing golf shot.
3) Ground rules. In golf, as in Crossfit, there is training and there is competition. In each these activities often overlap; you play like you practice, and all. We might allow some technique breaks, a occasional shorting of ROM in a training session, in order to achieve our training goal of the moment. Likewise, during a practice round we might drop a second ball and hit a shot over, improve a lie such that we are training only the swing and the distance.
“Play it as it lies”, however, is how you play competitive golf. Arrive to find your ball behind a tree or in a divot? Tant pis. Play it as it lies. Trained for six months for chin-over-the-bar pull-ups and arrive at the Games to find chest-to-bar? Same thing. “Call your own penalties” is the standard in golf; in a CrossFit competition we accede to the judge’s call. Same thing, really.
When it’s time to compete we “play it as it lies.”
4) Focus. “Play what’s in front of you. Your score is just a succession of numbers. Don’t add them up until the end. Don’t dwell on the past.” ‘Hap’ Duvall, father of David. (What? You thought there wouldn’t be a teachable moment?)
The most classic of CrossFit competitions, like the unveiling of the Crossfit.com WOD, are examples of encountering the unknown and the unknowable. Being prepared to address the challenge ahead based on the work you’ve done prior on the driving range or the putting green or, indeed, in the gym. You my…nay, you SHOULD…draw on what you have learned before, but that’s all. It makes no sense to play and replay the last shot or the last hole. You prepare to play what’s in front of you.
Add ’em up at the end. Thinking about your score through 9 is likely to interfere with your preparation to hit your tee shot on 10. If you are gauging your effort in your WOD based on your time to that point, chances are you haven’t worked hard enough up til then, eh? Focus on the next rep.
Crossfit golf. The bar doesn’t care who you are. Do the movement as prescribed. Concentrate on the next rep, and add them up at the end. While you’re at it, that’s not a bad start to life OUTSIDE the gym, too.
I’ll see you next week…
Posted by bingo at September 4, 2011 11:38 AM
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 4th, 2011 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Crossfit, Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.