I Hate Golf.

I know I shouldn't, but I do. It's outdoors. I like the outdoors. It would be good for my career, and I like my career. A lot of people think it's fun, and I like fun.

But I hate golf.

Let's face it. I'm just not good at this sort of thing. Competitive sports have never been my strong suit.

I wrestled on junior varsity in high school. The reason I made the JV team was because I was one of only two guys small enough to wrestle in the 89 pound weight class. The other guy actually could wrestle and made varsity. That left me in sole possession of the JV position.

That season I spent so much time on my back that I can, to this very day, describe the ceiling in every gymnasium in the district in vivid and excruciating detail.

I tried basketball. I liked the sport a lot and became a decent shot. But I was far too small to make the school team and had to settle for a spot on our church league team. For those of you who don't know, church league teams are often made up of guys too small, too slow, too uncoordinated, or too delinquent to play on the school team.

In fact on my team we had one really good player. I wondered why he didn't play on the school team so I asked the coach about it one day before practice. It seemed our church league star had beat the crap out of a kid at high school practice for fouling him during a drive to the hoop. He was therefore not allowed on the school team. Needless to say our star scored a lot of points in the church league. Nobody was dumb enough to even crowd the lane when he had the ball. Our strategy became simple. Pass "Killer" the ball and watch him drive. It was like he was Moses parting the Red Sea, a point not lost on our church-ified coach. Killer would get the ball and suddenly the lane would clear. Defenders who'd heard of Killer's rep would literally run the other direction leaving him to an uncontested layup.

It always struck me funny that you could beat up a kid and be banned from the high school team, but you could still play for Jesus!

My experience at golf has been no less traumatic. Once I hit a tee-shot that zoomed three inches off the ground slamming into the side of an unsuspecting ground squirrel. Amazingly the squirrel shook it off as one of the smart-asses in my foursome commented that "at least when you golf with Dave, you'll never have to worry about starving to death". Funny. I was granted a mulligan, teed up the ball, and took another fateful swing. The ball took a still unexplainable trajectory, violating about 43 different laws of physics, and slammed into the roof of a nearby restroom building cracking the new solar panel installed days earlier. The rest of my foursome collapsed in laughter as I tried to bend the graphite driver over my knee.

Ever try to bend a graphite driver? My knee still hurts - and yet the driver is still as good as new.

So this is another reason I like to run. Only myself to compete with and no "team" pressure. Time to think. Time to relax. No expensive equipment, no violent teammates, no coaches yelling "Drive Moses! Drive!"

Ground squirrels everywhere are grateful.