Golfing Is Not Rowing | Hacker News Reader

Golfing Is Not Rowing

taylor.town

86 pointssurprisetalk64 comments

I loved this. Having recently transitioned from running ultramarathons to trying to break 100 on the course, I figured I already had the discipline to brute force effort my way by hitting balls 4-5 days per week. It wasn't until I worked with a coach and rebuilt my swing from scratch that I began to see any improvement and I actually got worse in the beginning for weeks.

One thing the two sports have in common is that good decision-making has much more leverage than in short distance sports like swimming and shorter road races (and presumably rowing, I wouldn't know). Most of my score improvement in golf so far has been due to making better shot decisions on the course rather than improved shot execution. Feels like a life metaphor in there somewhere but im sensitive about becoming one of those ppl who compare everything in life to golf.

Decision making is really important for people that can play golf well. I've played with a buddy a couple times and every time it's eye opening to see how he is practically playing a different game than me. I'm just trying to get the ball in the hole, get par if I'm lucky. On the other hand, he knows, most of the time, that he can get par quite easily. Instead, the game becomes about positioning, club selection, and approach; if I'm being honest, though, those concepts aren't even part of my game. I'm just trying to finish, to play the course, while he's trying to beat the course.

You can get in the weeds with complex decision making even when you suck. Say you hit your 3 wood 200 yards and you are 200 yards away from the hole. Course management would tell you that you hit your 9 iron well x% more often than three wood so maybe try and hit it twice laying up instead of the hero shot. Then there is the true reality unbound by theory like course management is, where if you thin the hell out of that 3 wood it is still going to skip forward at least 130 yards making it a safer shot than the 9 iron with a risk free attempt at the green coupled in.

Taking a moment to consider the green before you chip on is also a simple concept that would benefit golfers of all handicaps. Setting yourself up for easier putts or the chance to roll the ball in off the chip just takes awareness rather than skill and repetition.

Golf is one of the more interesting sport just from a standpoint of how many considerations you are making and how lies aside from the teeshot are often so unique.

>Then there is the true reality unbound by theory like course management is, where if you thin the hell out of that 3 wood it is still going to skip forward at least 130 yards making it a safer shot than the 9 iron with a risk free attempt at the green coupled in.

Yes, I improved when I accepted that the objectively correct decision based on a perfect shot execution was not necessarily the right decision for me. Subtle but crucial distinction I didn't have at the beginning and had to develop with experience.

If you go to a golf coach to "learn golf", they will teach you how to hit the ball. A crucial step, no doubt, but that's well short of "playing golf".

Golf is first understanding what to do, then executing it. It's a risk/reward balance. Yes, execution will fail sometimes (ok, often), but at least trying the right thing is better than successfully expecting the wrong thing.

In so many ways, it's just like software development.

Planning to play your 25th percentile shot, instead of trying to execute a 90th percentile shot saves like 10 strokes a round easy. Golf skill is narrowing the distribution, not improving the max.

Good decision-making is critical to golf. If you're interested in furthering your development, I highly recommend Decade[1]. Great resource.

[1] https://decade.golf

> It wasn't until I worked with a coach and rebuilt my swing from scratch that I began to see any improvement and I actually got worse in the beginning for weeks.

How does one get into golf? How do you start? Buy a beginner set (?) of clubs from online reviews? Is there a way to find a good coach (accreditations?)?

While this is a super interesting post, and worth contemplating, I do not think it is a useful story for the majority of aspiring writers, who often are very good at thinking themselves into a creative block. (Aspiring writer being someone who wants to write, but isn't writing yet)

> Programs like NaNoWriMo mislead aspiring writers. "Write every day" is great advice, but the first 90% of writing a book is often not writing -- it's thinking/planning/researching. There are other golf clubs in that bag. Many writers only start "writing" once their ball is very nearly in the hole.

To use the author's analogy, NaNoWriMo is useful for encouraging the aspiring writer to actually show up tothe golf course or the rowboat, because most people who want to write have talked themselves out of it.

(I would be curious to learn more about the "many writers" claim.)

It's also worth considering how writing a book/post/whatever contributes to an overarching body of work. Two quotes come to mind:

“Every novelist spends their life writing the same story over and over.” Danielle Chelosky https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/writer-and-music-j...

“My subject matter doesn’t vary so much from book to book. Just the surface does. The settings, etc. I tend to write the same book over and over, or at least, I take the same subject I took last time out and refine it, or do a slightly different take on it,” Kazuo Ishiguro says to The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2015/jan/16/kazuo-ish...

I think it's more useful to see writing literally as part of the thinking/planning/researching process, not as separate from it and thus soil for a creative block.

Completely agree. NaNoWriMo solves a problem that the author doesn't even mention. And I like your point that writing is part of the thinking process. Indeed, Richard Feynman claimed that his notes were his thoughts. He saw no distinction between them, and that useful fiction was important to him making progress.

> Some activities have smooth progress bars: rowing, knitting, cycling, climbing, bodybuilding, etc.

I am being pedantic here, but bodybuilding/strength training definitely does not have a smooth progress bar. You need to be prepared for there to be weeks, or even months, where you are just not lifting what you were able to before.

This is actually true for many forms of physical training, including not just strength training but also endurance training (running, etc.) Plateaus and injuries aside, the basic principle of training is overload followed by recovery, and it's not uncommon during the overload phase to have high levels of fatigue and minimal improvement if not regression.

This is something a lot of casual athletes don't notice because there is a very steep development curve for the untrained, so you just getting better very quickly. Once you have been training for years, gains come much slower.

I mean.... None of those activities have smooth progress bars. It's not pedantic to point out the entire premise is flawed.

I don't doubt that the other ones aren't smooth either. I just have no experience with them to say one way or the other.

Doubling down here on the analogy - I used to row, and the progress is anything but smooth. There are absolute massive leaps that come from a years worth of training wit very little to show for it in the middle.

I do like his point about taking all the mulligans though!

Rowing (and all other forms of exercise) are definitely non-linear in progression. Most of the time the progression is sub-linear, but rarely you get the other thing too.

From 2013~2023 I would struggle to row 10km in any duration. My typical daily routine would be 2~3km. From 2023+ I can row 10km every single morning 365 days a year without any issues.

Some kind of step-wise change occurred about 2 years ago. It wasn't a gradual or linear event. I vividly recall a day where I just kept going and going without paying attention. I finally look down and there was 14km indicated on the display. At this point I figure I can do 4km less than that every day since it wasn't too bad. 80% of it seems to be psychological. The human body is incredibly adaptive, even over short time frames.

Confidence is probably the most important thing in making progress with things like weight lifting. Definitely in Olympic lifting. I've seen people go from a 135lb to a 225lb clean & jerk in one day with a good coach.

> strength training definitely does not have a smooth progress bar

Not at intermediate or advanced levels, but for beginners on a well designed program like “starting strength” it typically does.

Right. Basically, beginners in any sport are naive to effectively all training stimuli, and so they will respond to a wide variety of inputs.

Once you get adapted it gets harder and harder to find new stimuli that will trigger new adaptation without breaking you down too much. If you're interested in running, Steve Magness and Jonathan Marcus talk about this quite a bit in the On Coaching podcast (https://www.scienceofrunning.com/podcast-2?v=47e5dceea252).

The author is talking about progress within one game/set/race not over the long term. In lifting during your first rep you can notice that your stance was slightly too wide and adjust it for the other 4 reps. Just like in rowing if your first paddle is a bit out of sync you can fix it.

The point is those are activities with highly repetitive efforts and you can adjust after each one with feedback.

Golfing is not like this, if you miss your first swing, you can’t micro adjust for the second one, because it’s going to take place under completely different conditions where the feedback you just got does not apply usually.

That is not my read on the post, and your point doesn't really make sense. The objective of all these activities is measurable improvement. The practical discipline in each practice session for each activity is the bare minimum to improve and every activity has it. The point of the post is that some activities tend to see consistent, linear improvement over the long term where others tend to see droughts/plateaus.

Running is a great example because a dedicated runner, even a hobbyist, can expect to see 3-5% improvement in speed/endurance or whatever every season. But no runner expects to see improvement during a single run. But the same isn't true for activities like golf or language acquisition (my own example).

Running improvement isn't actually like this, except for beginners.

First, you actually do quite a bit of periodization at the season level, so you might have a long base block, followed by a more stamina/quality oriented block, then race specific sharpening, followed by taper and an A race, and then rest. Improvement is distinctly non-linear across these phases, and you'll actually start each season fairly far behind where you were at your peak.

There are also plateau effects, where you've basically adapted as much as you can to an existing stimulus and you need to find new ways of triggering adaptation.

A few years ago, I went skiing and rode a chairlift with a novice skier and some of her friends.

She kept complaining that, as soon as she got into a rhythm, the ground would change and she couldn't maintain her rhythm.

She didn't "get" one of the fundamental points of skiing; one that is so basic that it's rarely explained. Part of the fun of skiing is that the ground changes and varies and is not repetitive. A ski trail is not an exercise machine.

The archetype of the article is the fallacy that, when someone learns something new, they think the same kind of patterns will emerge that formed some other activity. Golfing is a low-impact sport, rowing isn't. Skiing isn't repetitive and mindless like an exercise machine.

I wouldn’t call golf low impact. If you walk 18 it’s 5 or 6 miles with 25lbs on your back. Many pros tend to blow up their back and require surgery in their early 30s. Even amateurs can suffer from back or hand issues. It may not be intense cardio like rowing but the body is certainly being used towards its limits along some vectors and being put at risk for injury. Swinging a weighted metal rod at 100+ mph sometimes with all that force going right back from the ground you chunked into your wrists and spine.

It’s lower impact than most other sports (excluding sports like darts or bowls, of course).

There’s a reason that (i) professional golfers have a longer career than most other professional sports and (ii) many sports people transition to golf later in their career and (iii) there is a high preponderance of older players in golf.

And that retirees play it long after they've stopped playing other sports.

You know that you can rent a golf cart. There's a reason why retirees play golf.

Believe me I know. But comments like this again betray your ignorance to the game. Retiree geriatrics run marathons too, nowhere near the pace of a young person. Same thing with golf. A younger person is able to generate sufficient torque to injure themselves in the swing. It is just how the physics work. No point in arguing against it.

> A golf game is 65-75 swings over ~5 hours

Aaaah! If only it took me that many swings I'd die a very happy person.

(5 hours is waaaay toooo long to torture oneself).

Don’t forget the 40–50 putts. :)

Play with friends that are willing to grant generous gimmes.

When I play golf, I just play to have fun. I’ll take 2 shots here and there. I don’t keep my score. I’ve met a few scratch golfers who will secretly tell you that they don’t enjoy golf anymore. It is at that point it transforms from a hobby to an obsession, a line which I’m unwilling to cross.

In my experience as someone who started learning how to golf in their 30s, you need to be playing at least 4x a week to get good enough to start enjoying it in the first place. Unless you like shanking balls 5 yards, looking for lost balls in the woods, or picking your ball up near the green because the rest of your group has already finished the hole. Which to me, is no fun at all.

I also picked it up in my 30s - twice a week for a year with lessons along the way is enough to get you to sub 100, and it’s perfectly fun to play at that level. Going lower than that does take more effort though.

Thing is though, the more you play, the more expectations you have (or don't have depending on your seriousness).

I used to play frequently, and would be constantly unhappy with my round because I put effort into the game. Due to costs increasing, job being more demanding, and just having other things to do, I've golfed very little this year.

I've played 2 full rounds this year, spent very little time on the range (much more on the putting green, as my residential building has a small turf green that I can just noodle around on at any time) and expected zero from each round.

Ironically, those two rounds have been by and far the best rounds I've ever played in my life. For one of those rounds, I actually took a small-ish but still decently sized dose of magic mushrooms. 2 of my playing group were serious golfers and completely sober, and they were blown away by how relaxed i was when i was tripping. I was calm, relaxed, and enjoying my golf but still completely locked in and focused, and still tripping. I was like +6 through the front 9 from back tees, which in my book is fucking amazing as I generally shoot low 90s.

Tripping guy, "I was+6"

Sober partners, "Dude you were+21"

The real goal for a bunch of golfers is to get to the point where they're not the slowest guy on the team and stop there. At that point you can network on the field without annoying the people you're trying to schmooze, but also not show them up. It's about who you are playing with, not the game itself.

“A golf game is 65-75 swings over ~5 hours.”

What about the back nine though?

Beautiful comment.

This guy golfs.

They never golfed with me, double the swings and then triple the time I take to find my ball. I have the hardest time find things, not just in golf :)

So I guess I would get a decent workout by all the walking I do. FWIW, I have not played golf for over 30 years due to having a hard time finding the ball.

For golf, you don't try harder, you relax more. At the highest level of sports, even rowing, I suspect it's similar. Only in golf do we compare the outcome of a ball flight -- we think we row similar to professionals, but there a ton of difference, you just can't see it in the result of ball flight.

My go-to golf philosophy book is "Cheng Hsin: The Principles of Effortless Power":

> To relax, you must surrender your mind-even the notion that you have a mind. You will find that relaxing your mind is the same thing as relaxing your body. There should be no separation between your mind's activity and your feeling-awareness of bodily sensations and impulses. Feel yourself letting go so that your body isn't "held" so much--this requires doing the same thing with your mind. When you relax your tissues, nervous system, organs, the muscles around your organs, every-thing, then the energy will flow. It is this very relaxation that allows for the energy, or feeling-attention inherent in your body-being, to circulate, develop, and be utilized.

Don't know how this affects daily writing ;)

Have you done any rowing? There is certainly some technique involved and you can't be all tensed up. But at the highest levels everyone has excellent technique. As an endurance sport, performance largely comes down to VO2 Max and pain tolerance, plus a bit from height.

Golf is like rowing, like knitting, like learning a new language. If you start without instruction, you'll build bad habits that stay with you forever. You can row as hard as you want, but without proper technique, you’ll never get faster. Golf is the same. Effort doesn’t equal improvement unless it's guided. If you start with fundamentals and practice them intentionally, you will get good. But if you repeat the same shitty swing for 10 years with no feedback, you’ll end up exactly where you started.

> If you start without instruction, you'll build bad habits that stay with you forever.

> Effort doesn’t equal improvement unless it's guided.

This obviously has to be false. Progress is made, people learn better ways to play golf and do all the other things. At the frontier, people simply MUST be doing self-guided experimentation and learning from objective results, and since this has always been true, there was once someone who could not play golf at all (because no one could) who figured out how to hit a ball with a club correctly on their own, without learning from anyone else, because that person was the first person who did it. Thus, self-guidance must be possible and self-improvement must also be.

> But if you repeat the same shitty swing for 10 years with no feedback, you’ll end up exactly where you started.

You always have feedback. If your ball doesn't go where you intended, your swing was bad in some way. If you keep doing the same thing without making adjustments based on measured outcomes, yeah, you won't improve. But you can try different things and figure out what works and what doesn't without ANY instruction or outside guidance.

I agree in principal, but: The people at the frontier aren't alone at the top of a mountain, they still have each other for guidance. The master that transcended limits while in isolation is a literary trope.

This doesn't contradict my point at all, I agree entirely that people work with each other and it's a great way to learn. And obviously people aren't going to achieve what took tens of thousands of person-hours at the highest level in one lifetime on their own. One does need to stand on the shoulders of giants and all that.

But the OP was making a much stronger claim, that it is, in principle, impossible to learn anything on one's own, and that HAS to be wrong, for the reasons I listed.

For what it’s worth that tracks with me experience in video games.

When I sat with 30 other testers for 6 days per week I achieved mastery I did not believe possible. Eventually I could cakewalk even the most difficult challenges in those games and I was generally recognized as a highly talented tester.

Meanwhile I’ve sunk more cumulative hours alone into Elden Ring and I have accepted I will never reach that same level of mastery.

It’s a humbling realization how much of my prior greatness was actually just my environment at the time.

> people simply MUST be doing self-guided experimentation

And self guided exploration is a skill in itself which you have to learn. You can experiment for years and get nothing of it because you don't even measure anything. You can find a local maximum and, not knowing the concept, never try something radically different.

There are basically zero players on the PGA tour right now who were self taught. For the next generation of pros, if you are not a plus index player by the time you are around 13 you have no chance whatsoever.

I think with rowing in particular due to certain counter intuitive parts of the stroke you absolutely can get nothing out of years of self exploration.

I like this framing!

One analogy I'd make is alternating periods of

    - "grinding through tests", making them green, and 
    - deep design work (ideas often come in the shower, or on a bicycle)

If you just grind through tests, then your program will not have a design that lasts for 3, 5, or 10 years . It may fall apart through a zillion special cases, or paper cuts

On the other hand, you can't just dream up a great design and implement it. You need to grind through the tests to know what the constraints are, and what your goal is! (it often changes)

---

So one way I'd picture programming is "alternating golfing and rowing" ... golfing is like looking 100 yards away, and trying your best to predict how to hit that spot. If you can hit it accurately, then you can save yourself a lot of rowing !!

Rowing is doing all the work to actually get there, and to do it well

> Golf cannot be played in tidy 1-yard increments.

Sure, but it requires tidy increments of effort and practice. At least according to advice from a reddit thread about golf[1].

> To make a golden necklace, you must start with gold.

But maybe practice with silver or copper necklaces first, or you’ll waste time and money for no good reason.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/golf/comments/sgppbe/whats_the_best... e.g.: “Get a lesson to identify flaws and get drills to work on said flaws. Go to the range and practice those drills to get them down. Rinse. Repeat.”

The golf swing is extremely non-intuitive for several reasons, not the least of which is the physics of trying to swing a hunk of metal at the end of a 3-foot rod around your body at 100mph. Fixing one thing will often send something else out of whack. Improving the golf swing requires system-level analysis, trying new things to see what else is affected, and then fixing the regressions.

Ben Hogan once said something along the lines of:

"Reverse every natural instinct and do the opposite of what you are inclined to do, and you will probably come very close to having a perfect golf swing.”

Just some nitpick:

Bodybuilding, and many other sports, follows logarithmic growth. Lots of progress in the early years, until you reach peak and start plateauing.

Bodybuilding does not have a linear progress bar. Sometimes you train and train and train and see little or no progress, and you need your coach to come make adjustments to your diet, routine, or supplements (incl. anabolic "supplements") in order to break the logjam.

Source: Not a bodybuilder but know enough bodybuilders to have heard this story many times.

> There are real tigers in those woods.

Nice little nod (on a post about Golf) to Tiger Woods.

I found this post to be very encouraging. I'm kicking around some novel ideas and mostly I am just building some lore documents. Glad I'm not the only one.

> Golf is not so smooth. Yes, each round is a state-dependent game of error-correction (i.e. Zeno's Paradox). But golf swings are coarse actions -- few swings per game, with no recourse for fine adjustment between swings.

This is a bit of a contradictory statement. The "error-correction"'s are typically fine adjustments between swings. Small adjustments to setup, backswing, tempo, etc. are exactly the sort of thing a golfer adjusts during a typical round.

> A golf game is 65-75 swings over ~5 hours.

For Tiger Woods

This number likely isn’t counting putts. Which for someone taking that many swings/shots will be 35-50 putts on top

I appreciate the goal of this article... But everything has plateaus. Progress is never linear.

Analogies all the way down.

“A typical golf game is 65-75 swings per game”

I wish…

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