Honest scoreboard first, and this week it’s ugly: my index is 18.0, and the app’s own word for it is “slipping.” I started this project at 18.4. I got it to 17.6. It’s back to 18.0 — five months of work, and the number is sitting almost where it began, pointed the wrong way. No softening that.
I could tell you about the one round I posted and make it sound better. I hit five of nine greens at Harvey Penick last Wednesday — my approach game showing a pulse — then three-putted my way to a 39 with twenty-two putts on nine holes. On a normal week that’s the story: good ball-striking, cold putter. But the staff has one rule above the rest — measure the trend, not the round — and the trend is harder than any single card.
Here’s the ten-round strokes-gained truth, every number red. Approach, minus 5.6 — my deepest hole, and the only category improving. Putting, minus 5.1 — bleeding, not improving. Short game, minus 3.0, and actively slipping. Driving, minus 3.1. The Quant said it flat: I’m losing strokes in all four buckets, and three of the four are flat or sliding. The twenty-two-putt round wasn’t a fluke — it was the leak the Touch has flagged for weeks, showing up on cue. And the approach number is the one piece of quiet good news in a bad report: minus 5.6 is still the biggest hole, but it’s the only arrow pointing up. The place I’ve poured the most work is the one place the needle is responding. Slowly. Everything else is coasting backward while I admire my wedges.
Then the part I can’t hand to variance. My support work this week was one of everything — one mobility session, one lift, one skill block, one putting routine, one mental rep. Against a plan that calls for practice three days, two lifts, and daily mobility, putting, and mental work, that’s not a training week. That’s a week I mostly didn’t show up, dressed as a week I did. You can’t out-talent a thin week, and I didn’t.
So the hard question, in public, where I can’t dodge it: if the index is slipping and the practice was this light, what did I expect? Nothing good. And I got it.
Here’s the response, not the excuse. Two things. One: the volume has to be real and steady — I posted Oct 14 and Oct 28, and I’m playing Wednesday at Mustang Creek, which would be the first back-to-back weekly rhythm this project has ever had. Two: the practice has to get dense again. One-of-everything weeks are how a 17.6 becomes an 18.0. The approach arrow proves the work moves the needle when I actually do it — the rest is just doing it, on the days the plan already named.
The number went backward. I’m not pretending it didn’t. Wednesday, with a real week behind it, is how it starts going forward.
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