Ok, I'm back. Icy on the roads. First off, I'm pretty sure I injured myself slightly. The muscle directly under my shoulder was very painful after hitting a few balls today and it just got worse as time went on. It really affected my range of motion, and as a result, my swing speed and accuracy. Not making excuses, because my iron play was actually pretty good, but just giving the facts. Conditions today were cold at the range. I was in a sort of heated stall and the temperature outside was ~30 and misting. Before I started feeling the pain I was still noticing about a 5-10 yard loss of distance with the range balls compared to last week. Enough with that, on to the CB's.
As I mentioned earlier, I was extremely pleased with my irons today, especially on the range. I hit about 150 balls and hit mostly irons with some of the rest of my bag mixed in. I also played some fake holes and used targets as my focal point. I found that I was able to take aim at a target and get the ball close more times than not. Of course, I had some duds mixed in, but the accuracy was quite pleasing. Ball flight on well struck shots was high and I didn't have a hard time keeping the ball straight. When I got lazy, I was hitting a very high fade with about 10-20 yards of left-right movement. I mixed in a couple pulls as well, which went really far, but to the left of course. What's this tell me? That a good swing gives you good results and an OTT move will do what it always does. I especially enjoyed the accuracy I was seeing from the 8 iron to the PW. I really felt confident with all three clubs and hit a lot of really pretty shots with them.
Feel today was a mixed bag. Well struck shots felt and sounded great of course, but mis hits were kind of rough. It hit a couple hosel rockets that really stung and some of my worst toe shots didn't feel very good. Again, I was hitting the ball in below freezing temps, so I'm not going to give the CB's a mark off for that. Also, I grabbed a 9 iron and hit an e6 into the range and it felt completely different than the range balls. In fact, it felt downright heavenly. It was incredibly soft off the face and sounded a bit lower toned than the clicky (I really hate that word) range balls. As a side note, the e6 traveled about 10 yards farther than the best range ball I hit.
So, I said I was going to focus on forgiveness and I haven't forgotten. I have a picture below of an eight iron with four distinct shots. This was at the very beginning of my session, when I was still getting warmed up.
Starting on the left, you can see a very toed shot. Then, there are two shots low on the face right next to each other. Finally, there is a shot that was right in the center of the face.
First of all, I was able to tell that I hit the toe, hit it low, and hit it clean, respectively. Ball flight was substantially different. Today, I was hitting my 8 iron about 130 yards with a clean shot. The center face shot was towering and went that distance. The two shots lower on the face were thinnish, but not too thin. They traveled to 120 and were actually higher than I would have expected. They were what I would describe as mid-high. The toe shot was bad. Really bad. It faded off and only made it about 105 yards. There you have it. Low on the face, not too bad. Way out on the toe, pretty punishing as you may expect.
Here is a photo of the 7 iron.
I am going to talk about the shot that produced the mark low on the face out towards the toe. I don't remember the exact yardage of this shot, but I was very surprised how high the ball flew and that I wasn't punished too much in terms of distance loss. I think it was in the 10-15 yard range, which isn't bad for what I would consider some pretty poor ball striking.
I'll add more as I get more time.
Feel, sound, and ballflight are all just about perfect for me on well struck balls. Great writeup on your weekend experiences as well. Once the snow is gone, I'm going to play a couple practice rounds with a few balls to get a good handle on distances and how they perform for me from a variety of lies. I'm living vicariously through you right now
One-T;530831It does not have to be struck perfect. I am not that consistant of a ball striker. Look at Hawks last write up said:
