Now it is a sprint

I beat Strub by a solid 7 strokes at Traditions, and now he is in a deep hole with only one course left. He'll try to put on a brave front and say that he is confident he can make up 7 strokes in one day, but the statistics are clear that rarely does anybody win by 8 or more in a single day. He really needs a little help here.

The thing working most against him is the fact that when one of us plays bad, the other one invariably plays almost (but no quite) as bad. At Hiawatha last week, I had one of the worst outings of the year, and he managed to have an awful round of his own. If I have another bad day at Conklin, expect him to have a bad day of his own. His best chance is if I have an average day, and he comes up with the round of his life.

The final round at Conklin is at least 2 weeks away, and we have a tune-up at Genegantslet tentatively scheduled for this week. Strub is still chasing 100, despite the fact that he has shown marked improvement throughout the summer in everything except his driving game. In fact, a common refrain last week at our shockingly bad outing was that for two guys that played so much this summer, we still scored (and played) awful. Genny is forgiving, and gives some opportunities to make up strokes if you start slow.

At the end of the day, this tune-up is about being ready for Conklin, whenever we get there. Strub has experimented with taking his long clubs off the table (presumably because I guaranteed I would beat him if I took that route), with hitting driver at every opportunity, with hitting other woods off the tee, and all manner of other bold strategies. Now he has a very limited amount of time to figure out what actually works and stick with it. No matter how you slice it, the constant loser's refrain of "it's a marathon, not a sprint" is no longer true- it's a close to a sprint to the finish as you could imagine.