Putting Mantra

After 2 hours of putting practice out back, I have finally come up with a Mantra that works for me. When I go out to the course and play, before I putt I find myself trying to go over all of the basics in my head before each putt. This is way too much information to be doing on the spot, but I have not played enough and come up with the right technique so that it is all muscle memory like it needs to be. I can't go over everything in my head because it will cause unneccesary stress and confusion, so I needed to come up with a very short Mantra that will help me focus on one or two small things every time I putt. The Mantra that I can up with is: "Open your hand and extend"

"Open your hand and extend"

Some other things that I need to remember when I am putting are to keep my arm straight and on the line of play at all times.

Straddle putts are good when you are within 15 feet of the basket. Any farther than that and you will need to use some bodily momentum and balance with the rear leg.

Do not flick the wrist at the end of the release. Just open your hand and extend your arm towards the basket.

The farther you get, the more hyzer you will need to put on the disk. Still aim for the basket though. If you aim to the right of the basket, you will miss.

Fasting

Today I am not allowed to eat anything because I am having a procedure done tomorrow morning. This procedure requires my digestive tract to be completely cleared out (any guesses?). The last thing I ate was taco salad at 6pm last night and I had forgotten that I wasn't allowed to eat today. Had I remembered, I could have woken up and eaten a large meal but I forgot so I get to starve! Anyways, I got through Army PT this morning fine and haven't been hungry yet so we'll see how the day goes.

It is 3pm, 20 hours since I last ate and so far I do not feel hungry at all. My body does not feel weak and I have had no problems concentrating. I have even looked at articles about food and haven’t craved anything. I am not sure if this is because of the lack of fiber I have been eating the past few days, but so far I feel good! I also played 9 of the most successful and satisfying holes of disc golf over my lunch break. While I was playing, I felt very focused and observant of my strengths and weaknesses. I made many breakthroughs on my driving technique and got a few 100 yd drives within 20 feet of the hole! It is very interesting that just knowing that I will not be eating at all today has sort of lifted a weight off my shoulders. It is amazing how much influence food has over our daily lives. During work, I find myself constantly thinking about my lunch break and what I am going to eat and how if I can just make it, the day will be over. When I get home in the afternoon I am not hungry, but craving food so I grab a snack and start to think about what I should have for dinner. Then there is always the sleepies I get after eating. So much of my day is affected by food! I actually did not feel hungry at work. I think that most of my "hunger" is influenced by the amount I think about food. Thinking about it leads to wanting it. It really helped me to realize that I often want food without actually being hungry.

It is now 7 pm and I just finished drinking my laxative which is up there with whiskey as the most disgusting liquids I've ever drank. I made Mary take a sip and she couldn't even keep it in her mouth as she spat it all over the counter. I drank 24 ounces of it. I am still feeling fine, not super hungry, but I am feeling colder than usual. I am not sure if that has anything to do with empty stomach but it is still bearable.

Stay Present and Succeed

Most people have a craft or hobby that requires a great deal of skill to perform. We train and practice these skills in hopes to get better and better at our craft, but when it comes down to performance, our results are wildly inconsistent. More often than not, these inconsistencies are not a result of lack of preparation (because that is often where we look first). As humans, we tent to blame our preparation for our failures and prepare more for the next time, that is, if you are the type of person who doesn’t quit at the sign of failure. Failure can be very discouraging, but can also be very motivational if you have trained yourself to see it that way. For instance, if you fail, you might feel worthless and in an effort to never feel worthless again, you quit. OR if you fail, you might feel worthless for the time being, but you treat the failure like a puzzle that you have to solve.

Why did I fail? How can I do better next time? Was this failure a result of my preparations or my attitude?

As I said before, if might have a little bit to do with your preparation, but in my experience, failure is often a result of a poor attitude or a lack of focus. Something mental, not physical. The best thing you can do to enhance your skills would be to learn to OVERCOME MENTAL BARRIERS. Don’t let your emotions get in your way of success.

Confidence can be a hard thing to muster up on a whim, but practice can definitely help. Observe your thought process during a time when you are feeling confident and things are falling into place. Harness this thought process and develop a plan to steer your thoughts towards confidence when you are feeling insecure or unmotivated. Things are much easier to accomplish when you KNOW that you are going to accomplish them.

My current hobby is Disc Golf. I spend my hours watching tournaments and browsing forums on the best techniques to get the disc in the basket with the least amount of throws. When the weather is nice, I head to my backyard and practice putting or head to a field and practice distance shots. My form still needs work but it is pretty solid, but when I get out to the course to play my results are really inconsistent. Some days I have the best game of my life, and some days I can’t even finish due to frustration and failure. I have realized that these moods are completely dependent on my attitude when I start playing and how I handle my first mistake. If I decide that I NEED to do well on the course today, I will often fail because I am trying too hard and will get too frustrated at the sign of failure. When the first mistake arises, I become overly stressed as I try to find a solution to the problem in an attempt to save my perfect game. This stress usually causes me to make another mistake trying to overcome my previous mistake. The stress continues to build until eventually, after many double and triple bogeys, I walk back to my car in a terrible mood.

Oppositely, if I start playing with the goal to improve and to have fun, my game ends much differently. I have learned that it is important to take each individual shot without thinking of what will happen afterwards or what has happened to get you there. Don’t think about your score or your goals or your mistakes; simply focus on what you have to do to make a successful shot and visualize how that shot will look. This is a lot easier said than done. There are often times when missing a shot will result in the disc rolling downhill farther than you previously were or maybe even landing in a lake. If you cannot fully get these thoughts out of your head, you will most likely miss the shot. Making the shot requires complete confidence that you will make it.

The concept of “being present” is very important in every aspect of our lives, not just in disc golf. Having a hobby that continually breaks you down and humbles you is essential for growth. Just as this hobby breaks you down, so will life, and it is important to learn how to deal with such failures and turn them into successes. “Being present” is all about being where you are, both physically and mentally. If you are hanging out with your children, do not think about what you want to do when they go to bed. Be there for them and get the most out of every experience. If you are playing a round of disc golf or going for a run, do your best to eliminate thoughts of other things. This is especially hard while being in pain on a run, but no one else can control your mind but you. And if you can’t control it, it is now controlling you.

Now you may ask, why is it important to be present? If I am accomplishing my goal of running, why do I have to focus on the pain? These are great questions with answers that I am still figuring out for myself. The one thing I know is that by being fully present, you can begin to learn yourself. If your mind is constantly cluttered with random thoughts, how will you know which ones are important? The best way to clear the mind is simply to empty it and focus on one thing. Of course running alone accomplishes the goal of burning a few calories or helping you sleep at night, but there are no lasting effects unless you also work on your mentality. Running provides a unique experience in which you are constantly faced with struggle and pain. To continue running, you have to overcome these obstacles and keep moving. Learning to not only deal with the physical pain, but all of the negative thoughts telling you to stop.  If you can overcome these while running, you will have a much easier time overcoming them when real life obstacles arise.

Stay present. Learn to control your mind and you will find peace. 

Personal Disc Golf Revelations

Driving the disc uses a very unique motion that involves a running start, wind up, and throw. When you throw, your arm must come close to your chest as opposed to out in a crescent shape, and must snap in front of you as you pivot on your outside heel and your rear leg spins around you. You want the disc to go as far as possible and so logic tells you that you must throw it as hard as possible. I have always used muscle and speed to throw farther which creates drastic unreliability and terrible accuracy. Today, I tried simply saying "slower" while I drove and it worked! A small amount of distance was sacrificed (20 ft max) but my accuracy improved by a ton! It is still a little rough but I can now throw far in the general direction in which I am aiming.

I have been watching a lot of professional Disc Golfers doing putting demonstrations to find the form that works best for me. I chose to learn the one based on the snake strike where your weight starts on your front foot as you line up the putt. It then shifts to the back foot as you bring the disc in to your body and comes back front when you release straight out. The point is to remove the inconsistencies of a crescent put coming across your body. If your arm moves in a straight line, the disc will hit its target. I realized today that I need to just release the disc in the exact spot that I lined up. I have been lining up and then releasing either lower or higher than where it was.

The final thing I realized today was that if I want an up shot to curve, I need to use an over stable driver. My mid range discs curve but very unpredictably. They are good for long straight shots with an obstacle near the end. If there is an obstacle in the middle that I need to get around, I need to use a driver.

Should we slow the aging process?

Every time I hear someone mention how cool it would be if we could slow or stop the aging process, I think of how that would affect population growth. I never hear this issue discussed and wonder if I am the only one who thinks about it (I am sure that I'm not, but it feels like it). This makes me think of "The Imitation Men" movie I recently saw. Everyone was so focused on cracking Enigma, the Nazi code machine in World War II, that they did not think about what would happen if and when they finally deciphered the code. Luckily, the man who was tasked to lead the team of mathematicians, Alan Turing, realized what would happen if they used the information to avoid all incoming attacks and decided to keep it a secret even from his boss. He was forced to make heartless decisions regarding who lived and who died in the war. Like I said, the Allies got lucky that Alan Turing was driven by logic and not emotions but can we hope to get as lucky again with the aging process?

If we create a cure for aging, eventually somebody like Alan Turing will have to make the tough decision to implement a form of population control that will most likely create a great amount of controversy among normal people around the world. If people stop dying naturally, people will either be limited to one or two children or humans will have to agree to end lives at after a certain amount of time. Somebody is going to have to determine how long we will be allotted based on natural resources and consumption rates. The planet simply cannot allow our population to grow at the rate it has been growing for much longer. In the past 200 years or so, the population has grown from 1 Billion to 7 billion people. 

As morbid as it may sound, I have a hard time finding a solution that doesn't involve euthanasia as well as a child limit. A universal age limit of, say, one hundred years or so as well as only having two children. I believe there should be exceptions of course that can be applied for. For example, if one of your children died you should be able to have another one. Also, if you are reaching the end of your allotted time but are very close to completing very influential work, you should be able to apply for an extra amount of time.

New Records

With rain falling and wind howling at over 10mph, I decided it was a perfect day to play some disc golf! I just returned from Las Vegas two days ago and have been very lazy since then. Mostly playing video games and eating greasy food. Since I start work again tomorrow, I needed to do some physical activity to help ensure I can fall asleep tonight. Normally, disc golf is not very strenuous and tiring, but today I decided to sprint everywhere I went on the course. By doing this, I finished 18 holes in under 40 minutes which is a new record for me! I ended the first 9 holes with +2 (every hole is par 3 ranging from 240 ft to 410 ft). I tried not to be discouraged by this score and just start over fresh on the back 9 (same holes just repeated). I came out and birdied the first hole putting me at +1 overall. I Was starting to get fatigued from all of the fast running I had been doing but figured it was good practice playing tired. I parred the rest of the holes until number seven (360 ft with the hole hiding behind a giant tree making it nearly impossible to get close off the drive). I drove the my XCalibur a little bit past the hole to the left of the tree but it was still about 50 ft away from the hole. With the wind blowing in my face, I felt myself slip into the zone where everything becomes quiet and all I can see is the hole and the path I want my disc to fly. I made the putt and it was the first time I screamed out of joy instinctively on the course. I was so excited because this was the first time I had birdied this hole (I actually usually bogey it). This put my total score at PAR! I have never finished 18 holes at or below par before. My previous record was +1. When I reached the last hole still at par, I made one of the best drives I have ever made on this hole putting me about 30 ft away. (This hole is the toughest because the hole sits with a 20 ft hill right behind it which makes it very very risky to overshoot since discs love to roll.) I knew that I could make a 30 ft putt and I was feeling really good but I decided to play it safe and take the par just so I could beat my record. I didn't feel good about playing it safe since it was just a practice round, but I felt great about ending the course with par! I felt so good that I took a victory lap around the whole course.

New Year's Resolutions

New Year's Resolutions (a.k.a. things I should have already been doing)

1. Save money

     - Make a budget that everyone knows and sticks to.

2. Say "yes" more often.

3. Finish more books.

     - Write reviews on books finished

4. Write more.

5. Travel.

6. Don't be afraid to call people.

7. Go to at least one disc golf tournament.

8. Judge people less.

New Year. New Blog.

New Year's resolutions.... Where to begin?

I don't like them.

I never have liked them simply because of how conventional they are. I approve of making each coming year better than the previous, but I am the type of person who constantly finds ways to improve myself so that each day makes me a better person.

That being said, I also have a hard time sticking with something for the long haul since I am constantly searching for new and better things to do. 

One thing I started to do somewhat regularly in preparation for my GRE was to write a blog. I primarily wrote about things we did at work so that our fans could get a better idea, but I also wrote a few personal articles too. Now that I am out of school for the first time in my life, I have noticed my ability to articulate my thoughts has started to dwindle. My pattern of thinking on a daily basis has also become much more shallow. The fact is that my brain is a muscle and since leaving school, it has grown much weaker. I blame the fact that it is not constantly being stimulated by homework and lectures. 

I have known this for about a year now and, as you see, have tried to work on it but have failed. My laziness kicked in and I stopped writing all together. I am hoping that I stopped because I limited myself too much on what I could write about. My goal with starting this new blog is to write to myself about anything and everything that I can think of. Some days I will write about very though provoking topics and other I will write about a T.V. show or Disc Golf (both of which can actually be fairly thought provoking). I am not going to try to build a following or categorize my posts by topic. I am just going to write whatever comes out so that I can look back at the end of the year and actually see improvements (much like how people weigh themselves for a year). 

If you end up reading some of my future blogs, I ask that you think deeply and avoid judgment.