I can’t believe a week has gone by already, but it’s time for the second installment of our new weekly feature, The Road to the 2015 GBO. If you remember last week’s post, I touched on the first two things I put in place to train and get ready for the Glass Blown Open next year.
Step one was to set a goal. I’ll be setting a whole lot of smaller goals on the way, but this was the big daddy. This was the overarching goal that set my vision for the coming months. Step two was to take away the foreseeable excuses of not being able to fully commit to and execute on that goal. For me, that was changing how much and when I work. Other than Sundays, I am now working all nights. 1pm – 11pm to be specific.
For the last week, every day has seen a minimum of 2 hours spent on my disc golf game. If you would like to see how I’ve spent each of those days, along with a daily lesson learned, head on over to Facebook and like the Mind Body Disc page. I’ll keep you up to date on the nitty gritty of practice, what I’m learning, and what I’m spending my time on.
Here on the blog, I want to stick to the big lessons and this week drove home a huge one. Step three on my road to the GBO is to make sure my training plan is sustainable. At 43 years old, I feel like I know myself pretty well. I’m an admitted self improvement junky and for the last 20 plus years, I’ve always been working on one aspect or another of my life. Always trying to make things better and to improve myself in any way I could.
I know from that time that I often get all excited about something, make grandiose plans, and then crash and die in a ball of flaming failure not long after I start. I get so geeked about a new idea or new phase in my life that I go totally OCD on it and over commit, over plan, and pretty much suck any possible enjoyment out of the process. I turn things that should be exciting and fun into work. Hard work. So much hard work that I couldn’t possibly lead a balanced, productive life outside of my new endeavor.
So, after a few weeks, the complexity and overall unpleasantness of my “well laid” plans yields the complete stoppage of any progress I was once excited about making. In other words, I take something that should be fun and good for me and ruin it by making it complex and hard. I’m guessing that there at least a few of you out there that can relate. Remember some of those big New Year’s resolutions you made? How’d those work out?
So how do you put this behavior behind you? How do you craft a months long disc golf training plan that won’t burn you out? You have to keep things fun for yourself. You have to keep them simple. You have to want to keep doing them and they can’t become a chore. Now I’m not saying it doesn’t take will power to practice every day. I’m not saying it’s all got to be puppy dogs and rainbows (or better yet, double rainbows!!!). I am saying that it needs to stay interesting. It needs to stay fun. It needs to stay true to why you enjoy playing disc golf in the first place.
The last thing I want is for this process not to be memorable. I certainly don’t want to get burned out on disc golf either. My biggest fear is that I’ll wake up one day and not only not want to hit the course and practice, but not want to play at all. That is something I won’t let happen.
This is a lesson for all of us and it applies to a lot more than just disc golf. There are plenty of people out there that have ruined their passions by overcomplicating them and making them work instead fun. Remember, you have to always keep your “why” at the forefront of your mind. Isn’t your “why” for disc golf to have fun? I know it is for me. It would be ridiculous for me to make anything disc golf related lacking in fun.
I can’t tell you specifically what my training regimen will be just yet, but I can tell you what it won’t be. It won’t be countless hours each day throwing back and forth across the local football field. It won’t be 1000 putts a day 7 days a week. It won’t be repetitive, monotonous, or boring.
[tweetthis]The best #discgolf practice is the practice you will actually do.[/tweetthis]
We play an amazing sport. There are plenty of ways to get a lot of reps in and still have it be fun. I’ve worked on my game 6 of the last 7 days (Sunday is a gym day, but more about that in another post) and I’ve managed to find a different way to go about it each of those days. For those of you following along on Facebook, you’ve seen this. Each of those days has been fun. Each of those days has been productive. Even after just a week, I can tell you that I’ve improved.
Remember, when you are working on your game, small incremental daily improvements can add up to colossal gains over even a short period of time. There are 133 days to the 2015 GBO. If you were to go out and improve just 1% per day, you would be 133% better than you are right now when the tournament started. How well could you do in your next tournament if you were over twice as good as you are now?
That’s it for this week. I really appreciate all of you following along. If you don’t already, please consider subscribing to the blog. We’ll send fresh new content to your in box once per week and you won’t miss a single GBO update.
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