Thursday, 3 September 2020

Return to the UK and Covid 19

During the month of March COVID-19 started to hit the headlines more and more in the UK. There was little worry at that time in the USA, and we had continued to play between G T Bray and North Water Tower Parks for a week or so before we got an email telling us our UK bound flight had been cancelled for the first week of April. As the issue with COVID-19 was escalating quickly our attention changed to trying to get a new flight and return to the UK sooner rather than later. This was a saga in itself and not for this blog. 

Having looked into available courses in the UK we couldn't decide at this point how much we were likely to play, so trying to decide whether to take discs back with us to the UK was a dilemma. The course at Myerscough College, only 20mins away, was reported to be unplayable and Manchester was at least an hour away. So how many times a week would we realistic be able to play. I know thats a dream for some, being able to play as often as you like, I know we are lucky but would Disc Golf just be our sport to play in Florida on our return next time. We couldn't bear the thought of that so decided to take a few discs with us. At least we could just practice with those on our local small village park, which was an open field (pictured below).


I packed my Aviar, Shark, Wombat 3, Teebird and Leopard with the hope that I could do something with them. 

We arrived back in the UK the day before lockdown. We had decided to self isolate for 2 weeks. No going outside, no playing disc golf. I don't want to dwell on the challenging times we've all been and continue to go through. All I can say is that my focus on Disc Golf has kept my sanity. So during those weeks we spent a lot of time watching Disc Golf Videos.

After our 2 weeks of self isolation and then when as a nation, we were given the go ahead to take exercise once a day, we walked 10mins to our local park and just threw. It was good to be outside. After a few days of using this as our exercise we soon found that our discs didn't fly as far. We decided that firstly we had lost some physical conditioning and secondly the air temperature was definitely affecting the discs. It was much cooler in the UK than the 28C/82F temperatures we had been throwing in. The plastic of each disc felt stiffer and less flexible. Also we had to get used to the fact that the grass was different, so you didn't get the same skip, slide or roll that we had grown accustomed to. It was like starting all over again in some respects. Still, not to grumble as we were outdoors getting our once a day exercise incorporating a walk with throwing discs.

Walking to the park and throwing however, just wasn't scratching that itch, so we decided to try and create some kind of course using trees, rocks and exercise machines around the perimeter of the park as targets to aim for. We somehow managed to create an 18 "holes" course by crisscrossing across the park, along the edges and using the small car park as an out of bounds (OB) area and certain trees as Mandos (a mandatory flight direction that a disc must pass around, over or under). Doing this now made us think more about disc selection and made the once a day exercise allowance more enjoyable. This was great but we were now missing out on putting practice! A search on the internet and an order went in for an Innova Travel Basket. We couldn't wait for this to arrive.



No comments:

Post a Comment