There comes a point when you're either going to get better, or you're not. And then you have to decide whether you're even going to continue at all.

The last five years have been rough for me. I moved to a much harder house than I'd been accustomed to over the previous 10 years, and when I did my average dropped about 35 pins. I've still been able to bowl at a higher average in out-of-town tournaments, so I know my basic abilities are still there, but there's a laundry list of things that have changed for me recently as a function of getting older.

There was the heart attack, the sudden onset of come-and-go gout (lots of things happen after heart attacks, some that don't seem related but really are), a flare-up of tendonitis in my right Achilles. There's the arthritic right wrist, made worse by years of bowling with the wrong span and pitches. Weight gain. A degenerative right knee caused by a baseball injury from way back in 1988.

Last year, I made some equipment changes and bought myself a 10-pin jump in average from the year before, but that still only put me in the mid-170s (at this new house, we have fewer than 5 people averaging deuce). Regardless, that made me feel good, because I saw progress. But when the 2018-2019 season began, I lost most of that modest gain and am back to thinking 510 is a "good" series.

Sure, I can still have a good game (or get lucky) and roll a 230. But I usually frame it with a 150 on one side and a 160 on the other. We don't get a lot of help from the lanes here, but my bigger problem is myself -- my inconsistency, my aches and pains, my lack of time to practice.

Given that it's hard to get excited about watching yourself and your game disintegrate, I kind of hit a fork in the road a month ago: Either I would get better, or I would get gone. The one thing I will not do, especially at such a young age, is fall back to where I was when I was a beginner. I can already tell I'm not going to be happy in my senior years playing out the string.

The single biggest issue to overcome is definitely the wrist pain. No combination of pitches or spans seems to fix it anymore. My absolute, upper limit is 6 games bowled at a time. Sometimes I don't even get three. I'm worthless as a tournament bowler even though my last tournament, I finished second in handicap and eighth in scratch scores for all events. I just happened to get very lucky with my body that day.

I'm not sure going two-handed is going to solve that, but at least it takes the thumb out of the equation. Switching over gives me something to look forward to, at any rate. Maybe I'll find something I didn't know was there in the first place.

I've considered blogging the change, but I don't really have a place to blog. I don't want to bore everyone else here by posting banal league details every week. But I do want to see if it's possible to do, and if it is, I want to share that with other middle-age/older guys who are at a similar crossroads.

Or I'm going to give it all up. There's really no in-between anymore.

Jess

In the interest of leaving no ball unthrown, how is your other wrist?  With such a large delivery overhaul maybe it's be easier to switch sides.  We've had a couple folk out here that have been successful going lefty.

I've known several people to switch over the years and none got better. Only one that I can think of even maintained. I've got a good friend currently doing it for shoulder injury reasons and he's struggling. Worse than that, I bowled with a guy about 20 years ago who had blown out his right shoulder, switched, then proceeded to blow out his left shoulder as well.

I wasn't born with particularly strong wrists, and it took many years of building up my right wrist before I could throw with power, then another 10 years or so before I could ditch the wrist brace. I don't want to endanger my other wrist without the promise of much payback.

More things are sore this morning a day after two-handing it for the first time, notably my right bicep and shoulder. It's not an "injured" sore; it's more like how sore you are when you do 50 sit-ups after having not done any in a couple of years.

Jess

Week Two...

Practice scores: 132, 136
League scores (one-handed, immediately following practice): 180, 195, 246 (Dyno-Thane Threshold)

Summary: I bowled the first practice game with polished urethane (Visionary Slate Blue Gargoyle) and the second with a polished solid reactive (Storm Dark Thunder). I incorporated the skip-step into the delivery this week after practicing it "dry" in my driveway (i.e., without a ball in my hand). Whereas last week I had lost 6-7 mph from my one-handed delivery, I picked back up probably 3 mph and was throwing around 13 mph this week. That's not optimal, but it's progress.

The biggest contributor to those mediocre scores were seven different occurrences of this: 1/. That would be picking off the 7-pin on the first ball, and then clearing the rack for the spare. Of course, when you do that three times in a row, you've scored a whopping 33 or so over three frames. With both balls, I found myself gradually taking hand out of the ball by weakening my wrist position, or simply not rotating out of the ball at delivery, in an effort to keep the ball pocket-side. That helped, but again, that's not an optimal play. It did, however, tell me that I'm going to be able to make small changes in the delivery and adjust.

One thing I was not expecting tonight was a fair bit of pain in the middle finger after I was done with two-handed practice. This was the result of a pitch issue, and I'm not sure how to fix it. The SBG has forward pitch in the fingers (my old measurements), while the DT is reverse-pitched in the fingers. I was much more comfortable throwing the DT. Where the pain was coming from, though, was from the side of the fingers if I tried to come around the ball strongly. I'm wondering if I'm going to have to have extreme right pitch in those two fingers eventually. If so, that's not optimal, because now I would have to plug all my equipment. However, I'm sitting here typing this still with soreness in my finger, and since going two-handed is mostly about getting rid of pain, I'm not going to just tolerate it. I guess the middle finger is hanging up in the insert and getting jerked sideways at release.

On the flip side, I could have bowled as much as I wanted to tonight and had no wrist pain, forearm pain or shoulder pain. I haven't had that kind of experience in years.

Going from this into league and switching back to one-handed bowling, I found I was able, for the second straight week, to be very consistent and make better adjustments in the wrist. I still got a little wrist and hand pain afterward, though.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to do this again next week. It all depends, week to week, on my work schedule.

Jess

Just something to be aware of: you may wish to let a league official for your summer league know about your two handed quest so you don't have to deal with people accusing you of bagging.  Even in a summer league, people can sometimes suck.

im definitely planning on giving two hands a go for summer to determine if i want to officially switch, but i'm considering shooting spares one handed.  i'm going to give two hands a go but i'm already a good spare shooter, may keep bowling one handed for spares only

Week 4...
Practice scores: 118, 99, 90, 114
League scores (one-handed): 189, 152
League scores (two-handed): 175

Practice was completely unfruitful this week. In a quest to pick up speed, I found myself getting my timing all out of whack. Once that happened, I would spray the ball all around until I would either suddenly regain my timing, or not.

After my fourth practice game this week -- which ended in three straight marks as I switched from resin back to pearl urethane and went back to the basics -- I didn't intend to actually bowl two-handed in league until my original plan, which was first week of summer league.

And then my wrist decided it had other ideas.

Toward the middle of Game 2 tonight, I began to have the familiar old wrist pain coming from the right side of my wrist (as viewed from above). I described it to a friend tonight as feeling like I had karate-chopped a doorframe. My entire wrist hurt from basically the fat of my hand, through the entire wrist joint and about six inches up forearm. This is "normal" for me.

By the time the game ended, I could no longer abide the pain. It was either switch or quit, and I chose to switch.

I don't know what made this game different from all my practice games. Maybe I just focused more intently, knowing that if I botched this up it was going to cost three teammates and not just myself. I pulled out my Visionary Slate Blue Gargoyle (urethane pearl), made my approach slower, more deliberate and straighter, and ... shot 175.

I had one open frame -- the first, which went -7. After that, I rolled off seven consecutive spares, including two 3-10 conversions, then went X/X in the ninth and 10th for 175.

This was probably the happiest I've been while bowling in a long, long time. I actually committed to something difficult and pulled it off. And, my wrist stopped hurting. It's sore now (as it always is for a day or two after bowling) but I bet that changes next week if I decide to shoot all three games two-handed.

That's now a possibility, because despite winning all games tonight, our team was eliminated from contention with three weeks left. Any damage I do to the team these last three weeks will be minimal.

Jess