This is the sixteenth in a series on things to do in the golfing offseason to feed your golf addiction:

Go To The Driving Range

The GolfBlogger is not generally a fan of driving ranges. I’m convinced that reinforcing the skipping motion of a club off a mat does more harm than good when that swing is taken to the course. But even with those reservations, there just isn’t any substitute for the sound and the feel of surlyn on stainless steel and the view of a golf ball soaring into the distance.

Here in golf-mad Michigan, you can find hardy souls at the range in every type of weather—even in the dead of winter. And the GolfBlogger isn’t ashamed to admit that he’s one of them. Even in freezing weather, the range is a great place to feed a golf addiction.

This is the fifteenth in a series on things to do to feed your golf addiction in the winter.

Take A Walk

A great part of golf’s attraction for The GolfBlogger lies in the chance to be out of doors, in the fresh air and sunshine and away from the general cares of civilization. Rather than being a good walk spoiled, golf gives all that walking a purpose.

Thus for me, one way to feed my golf addiction in the winter is to get outside and take a good long walk. I am not, however, one to just take endless strolls, so my excursions often involve a trip to the store to pick up some sundries (I take a backpack) or to the library for a couple of books. I listen to audiobooks or my favorite podcast, EconTalk, on the way.

But even those walks don’t satisfy my need to get away from civilization. For that, I take a trip to the woods. With camera in tow, I head off on some snowy park trail, to shoot trees, shifting light and the occasional glimpse of wildlife. The air is crisp, the ground soft, and the sunshine even occasionally warm.

It’s not golf. But it does help to feed the addiction.

This is the fourteenth in a series on things to do to feed your golf addiction in the off season.

Decorate Your Desk With Ridiculous Golf Items

If you’re at all like The Golf Blogger, you’ve got a desk drawer full of Ridiculous Golf Items, courtesy of family and friends who know of your golfing addiction. And while they’re often too embarrasing to see the light of day during most of the year, the dead of winter is a good time to put them on display. At the very least, they’re good for a smile when the days are short and the temperatures low.

This is the thirteenth in a series of posts on things to do to feed your golf addiction in the off season:

Get Golf Fit

In spite of all the misgivings, golf is a physical game. Greater strength, flexibility and endurance will undoubtedly improve your game. The pros recognize this; so should we. Thus, you can feed your golf addiction and improve your summer game in the winter by taking the time to get golf fit.

This winter, I’m approaching golf fitness from several directions.

First, I’m determined to drop at least fifteen pounds. Less padding around the middle will increase my ability to turn quickly, boosting clubhead speed and distance. I’m cutting back on the calories and keeping track of them with an app on my BlackBerry. My overall goals are to cut out those sugary sodas, simple white carbohydrates (while keeping complex carbs, whole grains and the like), and other low-nutrient, high-calorie foods, while replacing them with high nutrient ones. So, no more cereal, toast or bagels for breakfast; now it’s an apple and cheese.

In conjunction with that, I’ve been getting up earlier than usual to ride the stationary bike in the basement for half an hour before work. That should speed up the weight loss and improve aerobic conditioning (so I’m not winded after a long climb up a fairway hill).

I’m also trying to increase my golf strength. My primary tools are a set of resistance cords called the GolfGym PowerSwing Trainer .To use it, you put a foot in the loop at the bottom, take address with your hands on the grip and go through the swinging motion. You can also wedge the bottom loop into a door jamb and pull down in a golf motion.

For core strength I’m going to try one of those core balls. A fitness-crazed golfing buddy of mine has long told me that these are highly effective ways to improve core strength (and get back to that flat-belly look I had in my twenties). A company called G2 Fit (whose golf stretching mat I use daily) has a core exercise ball that has illustrations of the exercises printed right on the sides. Like their self-guiding mat, the self-guiding ball would make it easier to keep track of what I’m supposed to be doing.

And finally, I’m continuing to work on my flexibility with my G2 Fit Self-Guiding Golf Stretch Fitness Mat . It’s a brilliantly simple idea: a high quality exercise mat with the stretching exercises printed right on the mat. No watching DVDs or flipping pages in a book. It’s all right there.

This is the twelfth in a series on ways to feed your golf addiction in the off-season:

Browse and Organize Your Golf Photos

I take a camera with me on every round—and you should, too. There’s always a great picture or two waiting, and it’s a great way to remember warmer days during the off season.

On most rounds, I take my Canon EOS Rebel Xsi with a 18-55mm lens and a polarizing filter. It fits very comfortably into one of the side pockets of my golf bag. At other times, it’s the Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS1, which is much smaller and actually pocketable.

Over the summer, I accumulate many hundreds of shots from the courses I play. Along with my scorecards and notes, they serve as the memory of my golfing life. Most of those photos are landscapes, but I also get quite a few wildlife photos and what I call “golf illustrations”—photos of the mundane: rakes, balls, rows of carts lined up and the like.

The offseason, then, is my opportunity to sort, edit and organize all of those shots. My tool of choice for that is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2. It’s the little brother of Adobe Photoshop in terms of photo retouching, but with organizing tools built in. One of the best features is the ability to rate and tag photos. That lets me search for, and easily find photos when I need them later.

A good many of the photos I take end up here on Golf Blogger. Others find their way on my computer screen as wallpapers and screensavers, into the GolfBlogger Michigan Calendar, and onto note cards that I make on my printer.

But mostly, they’re just a lot of fun to look at on cold wintry days as a way to feed my golf addiction.

This is the eleventh in a series on things to do to feed your golf addiction in the off season:

Organize Your Golf Scorecards

By the end of each season, my golf bag, car and desk are littered with the scorecards of rounds past. So one of my off-season tasks is to round up all those scorecards and throw away the ones I don’t want or need.

It’s more fun that you might think, and actually a great way to feed the golf addiction. I take notes on many of my rounds, so each card holds a memory of a (usually) warmer, and more enjoyable (again, usually) time. In any case, they are mostly worth revisiting.

After review, the vast majority of the cards end up in the recycling bin. Special ones, however, find a place in my scorecard binder. I always keep scorecards from fresh courses. And I’ll occasionally keep one from a particularly memorable round. That usually means a low score, but occasionally includes rounds that stick in my memory for other reasons. I also keep yardage books, which I purchase for every course which offers one.

Those scorecards and yardage books serve as my memory archive of my golfing past, and like my wife with the wedding photos, I occasionally take them out for a trip down memory lane.

Postscript: I also take time in the offseason to round up and sort through all of the golf pencils I’ve accumulated. Like scorecards, I keep the memorable ones. The rest to to school, where I loan them out to my students when they (inevitably) forget to bring one one a test day. I like to mess with their heads by telling them as I give them the pencil ... “wow, this is bad one. I remember that. I shot like forty over par. Hope you have better luck.”

But I’m evil like that.