Swinging Again

If you're fairly new to my blog or missed some from the last few months, I had an interesting end to my year last year. In November, I was working at the golf course, started backing up a golf cart in the cart barn, and caught my leg in between the cart and a pole. I suffered a bimalleolar fracture, meaning I broke both my tibia and fibula right around the ankle. While I was incredibly lucky that the structure of my ankle and foot remained in tact, thus avoiding surgery, it was still a long road to recovery. The summers in Florida are notoriously hot, and I often don't play much golf during those months, while the winters attract people from all over due to the perfection of the weather. Right now, in the middle of February, the temperature has been holding steady right around 70 degrees fahrenheit for the last week or so, and we're due for more of the same. I was on crutches for about 6 weeks after the accident, and then moved on to limping my way around in a boot for another 6 weeks. About 3 or 4 weeks ago, I got the boot off, but I was still in a lot of pain and my muscles were really weak. I've been making noticeable progress every day, but I would say I'm still only at about 75% recovery, so I have a ways to go.

I was, however, feeling a little ambitious today after teaching my weekly ladies' clinic and decided to go out with a couple of buddies for nine holes. Initially, my plans were to just hit a shot or two and work on my short game, mainly just to enjoy the good weather and kill some time before I had to go to physical therapy in the afternoon. After taking a few swings, I realized I could pull it off, and was able to play nine holes without much issue. My biggest problem was mental; my mind isn't allowing me to make a proper weight shift on the downswing into my left leg yet, and probably won't for some time. In golf, just as you would throw a ball, your weight starts on your back foot or is transferred there on the backswing, and then you transfer your weight to your front foot, towards your target. If you can't do that, it can lead to some serious issues in the swing, and is definitely not something you want to groove in the long run. For today, it was really fun to get out there and hit the ball around, and I really enjoyed it. Actually, given I hadn't played in quite a while, I didn't play that bad; I had a birdie and 3 pars, which isn't great but I was satisfied with it for my first round back. Given that my life has consisted of either working or studying lately, it was awesome to get outside and enjoy the thing I've been passionate about since I was 10 years old.

After getting the baby down, I settled down to get some work done, although I've been feeling pretty sick and didn't have much energy. I still got about 2 hours of work in, but figured I shouldn't go much later since I have a 10 and a half hour day tomorrow and need to catch up on some sleep. I started really getting down to work on Andrew Mead's The Modern GraphQL Bootcamp on Udemy yesterday, and I continued on with this course today, knocking out another decent chunk of the course. In today's work, we talked about setting up custom types and query for arrays. I wouldn't say this is review for me, since it's been some time since I worked with GraphQL and I never properly learned this stuff, but we are still in the fundamental stages of understanding this language. I absolutely love this course so far, and I'm quickly growing fond of Andrew's style of teaching. In his courses, he breaks for exercises about every 20 minutes of lecture to make sure his audience completely understands the material, and I love this. Instead of just following along with the code, we're given an opportunity to actually write it on our own and hit "blocks," as Will Sentance says. Hitting these mental hurdles and getting past them on your own is so important to the learning process and the magic ingredient that is missed in so many of these tutorial courses, but I think Andrew does a great job at addressing this issue. So far, the exercises have been fairly easy, which is good because you don't want them to be so hard that you give up on them. I'm sure as we progress in the course, the difficulty will ramp up on these.

Until tomorrow!