Left arm locked

Yesterday Torsten and I went golfing for the first time in our lives. I mean, it's not like we played 18 holes. But Torsten had a couple of colleagues ask if he wanted to go for a round of golf with them, and he had to decline because he had no idea how to play, and when he was telling me this I told him that I'd always wanted to learn (though I stupidly did not take the beginning golf class my college offered), so we decided to do it. We both like sports and are reasonably athletic, and it might be a good thing work-wise down the line too.

Our next-door neighbor is an avid golfer, so yesterday he took us to the driving range. I don't know how it works in other cities, but Denver has a bunch of public golf courses that don't charge a membership fee or anything, so since our neighbor has a few spare sets of clubs that we were able to borrow, all we had to pay was a couple dollars for a basket of golf balls. The driving range is set out over a pond with distance markers in it, and you hit the balls into the pond, where they float and are later collected.

Turns out golf is hard! Not that I was expecting anything less, but there are just so many different things to think about when you're swinging a club. Overlap grip, knees bent, arms and wrists out and locked in a V formation, head down, eye on the ball, backswing speed, keeping your left arm locked while you swing, holding your lower body still rather than swiveling, following through, turning slightly on your feet but not too much... and a lot more that I've already forgotten. Oh right, the hardest part of all... actually hitting the club against the ball rather than swinging over it entirely (me) or ramming the club into the grass before you get to the ball (Torsten).

However, it was surprisingly fun. We hit way more bad shots than good, but we each got a few good shots in and the feeling is awesome. And by the end of the two hours we were both feeling a lot more confident and hitting a higher ratio of decent shots. We will definitely go back... and once we've gotten OK at driving, we will need to work on chipping, putting, and probably a million other things I have no idea about. There are an awful lot of clubs in a set, after all, and I only know what three of them are used for.

Also, today I'm sore. My arms hurt from stretching and swinging them so many times. And I have blisters on my hands. Torsten has blisters on his hands too, but they're in all different places. That probably means that we're both holding the club totally wrong, but in entirely different ways. Oh well.