Blog
You know last week when I said tour life was pretty easy and I adjusted pretty quickly? Boy was I wrong. Turns out there's more to it than I had expected and there are pieces that are way harder than I thought possible.
Let me start by saying I played some of my worst golf in a long time last weekend at the Nick Hyde Memorial. I was on camera, and playing along-side one of my idols - Paige Pierce and I felt more self conscience and more defeated than ever... I've been getting "yippie" and missing 6 foot putts...SIX FOOTERS you guys!!! It's ridiculous. So, what's going on? The last few weeks have been a huge struggle. Things have been building up and I wasn't exactly sure why, but this weekend I had to address the problems. I've lived alone for three years and ended up loving the solitude. Now, I basically live with 3 to 10 people at a time all the time and therefore living on everyone else's schedules. I made the mistake of not taking time to myself and I haven't read my own emotions well enough to realize how tense I was getting. Alone time is important, it is so important. My relationship with myself has crumbled into something unrecognizable, and in turn my relationship with the people I care about i.e. boyfriend, has also been strange for the last two weeks. Rule number one - take care of yourself first. I preach this always but it is so hard to follow your own advice sometimes. The other part of this is my mental game has gotten lost in the mix. I feel like I need to play with people on my level in order to maintain a balance where I am still improving but still have confidence that I am a good player. They say that playing with the top pros is how you get better and while I think there is truth to that I also think it is extremely destructive after a long period of time for me. I'm playing practice rounds with two of the longest throwers in the game plus Eric Oakley who can crush over 500 feet easily and their bad drives are still 200 feet in front of my perfect shots. It feels terrible. I can't keep up. I'm always the last on the box, they're all waiting for me to throw my 3rd and 4th drive for their 1 and eventually I just feel like I'm not good at this anymore. I know that's not the case but constantly playing with some of the best in the world every single day really has crushed my confidence. It's 100% my fault for not being more confident in myself, but I just don't know how to cope with it. Last week I finally I started playing casual rounds by myself because I realized what was happening but it seems the damage was already done and now I need to rebuild. Also last week I did say that I had done a lot of fieldwork and distance training and I was hoping that it wouldn't mess up my game too much but it did this weekend on this beast of a course. I've been told I'm not crazy for playing like I did. It is HARD. The fairways are small, long and unforgiving though that doesn't give me a big enough excuse to play like I did. If you are off your line by an inch or two you're probably looking at a six instead of the three really easily and it happened so quickly. Every time I stepped up to the tee pad I was thinking about my new footing about my new positioning, and too many things. On a course like this you need to know that you are going to throw what you want to throw and you need to be confident in every single shot that you make and I was not. The lack of confidence came through in my putting, driving, pitchouts, upshots, you name it every single part of my game was compromised this weekend and I just could not fix it. This week, to counter all of this, I'm taking some time to myself, taking a bit of a break from disc golf and trying my absolute hardest to think positive about everything. I am determined to bounce back from this setback as quickly as possible and be the golfer and person I know I am. Wish me luck and thank you to all of my friends who have given me such good input and advice on recovering from this, and thank you for letting me be human. Peace, love, frisbees. Tina |
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Tina Stanaitis - Professional Disc Golfer (#68076), Entrepreneur, Full Time RVer, and Dream Follower Extraordinaire!
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