All around the land, golfers could be spotted pulling on thick mittens that look more like boxing gloves, and Santa hats. It is the season of the Turkey Trot, a chance to get a final game of the year in and build up an appetite for a winter warmer or two in the bar. Providing the rules haven’t changed by the time the round is finished, that is. Perhaps they’ll bring back the Scotch Egg clause…
My version of the festive loop was at Dundonald Links, a place I’d long wanted to visit, and the timing was perfect with the recent opening of the Club’s eco-lodges which, after the previous night’s arctic camp in a St Andrews car park, felt impossibly indulgent. I had the first tee time of the day, and with rain forecast shortly to accompany the one degree temperature outside, a hearty breakfast was rapidly consumed, and I set off, playing alone while my travelling partners did some video footage elsewhere.
I had planned all along to run this morning, with just three clubs in the bag - a hybrid, seven iron and my trusty hickory “approach cleek”, and the rugged links and fresh air were invigorating as I shared the early morning with just my thoughts and the nearby curlews. This three day trip to Scotland felt like a retreat to me, a chance to clear away cobwebs and get some perspective at the end of another turbulent, eventful year.
All around, the talk was of the latest Covid-19 variant, and if the last two years had taught me only one valuable lesson, it was to not take anything for granted. Out here, sprinting between shots and just catching my breath enough to putt (with the cleek of course, hooded to take a little loft off), I felt an urgency to soak it all in, use the oxygen deficit that the running was creating to inspire as deeply as I could, in case this were my last game for a while. At this point, another lockdown was a distinct possibility, and our trip across the border in the first place had always been in the balance.
Regardless of what the authorities would dictate, I stood on the edge of a natural pause anyway, having resigned a steady job in order to take a midlife stocktake of my priorities. After twenty years working in golf, I was playing far too seldom, and the love I’d once had for these courses and clubs, and for the charm and honour of the game itself, had fast dwindled in the ever-complex administration of it.
It was time for a clean break, and the chance to play a bit more and restore that passion for the game was a key part of the plan, if you can call it a plan. So the lurking fear that the country might once again be sent home to isolate at the very moment when my freedom opened up before me carried an additional irony for me.
As I ran up to the 11th tee, a sign caught my eye on the rustic, wooden litter bin by the path, and my running was paused momentarily to take a photo of it. The phone went back in the bag, and I faced this wonderful par-3 slightly distracted by what I’d seen, and this feeling would continue for the rest of the round, and on into the days ahead.
The sign simply said “ARE YOU ON PACE?”, and given that, despite the heavy breakfast, I was at this point barely thirty-five minutes into this loop, with ten holes already completed, it made me smile. The group immediately behind me on the tee sheet were on the third fairway, after all. But as time went on, it started to develop a deeper meaning for me, as if it was a reminder to take off the brakes, stop fearing what might happen and step into the unknown a little more often. Procrastinate less, and use this simple sign, this new screensaver of mine, as a reminder of the speed at which life will pass us by if we let it.
Those four words hit me like a sledgehammer in those moments beside the 11th tee, but in the quiet days of the festive break ahead, facing uncertainty like I’d never had - certainly never created - before, the meaning I invested in this epiphanette of a sign just carried on developing, soaking in. It is, every time I look at my phone, or notice my profile picture, a reminder to not hold back, to give it my all. To do my best, moment by moment, as that’s really all any of us can do.
So that was my turkey trot. No turkey in sight, playing alone under the dark rain clouds of the Ayrshire coast, and with an eight hour drive back to my uncertain future at home to come, not even a cheeky Shovril (or should that be Shevril?) to warm the cockles, although I didn’t want one, for the joy of being out here with my lungs heaving was all I needed.
And what about my metrics, given the sign’s clear implication that there must be a target in mind? I stopped counting my shots on the seventh but stopped caring a lot earlier than that, probably in around ‘98. The idea today was to have fun, and this was it, in spades. I had in mind some neat notion of “breaking eighty”, and I did so with a few minutes to spare, but my score was probably slightly north of that number - you try hitting Braid’s cleek out of a pot bunker.
“ARE YOU ON PACE?”, the bin demanded of me. With three clubs, a broken tee, and a very big smile, it felt like I was, at last.
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Epictetus would love that, and so did I