Shane Lowry: Tony Soprano and the gym kept me sane during lockdown

A few days into the pandemic, I kind of realised everything was going to shut down and I bought a bit of gym equipment and I set up a little gym in the garage.

I’d go in there every day. I’d have a Facetime session with my trainer, three times a week, and I’d do some other stuff every other day and that was kind of my little escape.

I never thought I’d say it but a gym was my get away for a few weeks!

Going down into the garage and do a bit of a workout and mentally it was good for me as well. Then I’d hang out with the family, go for a walk. Stay active.

To be honest, it did take me a couple of weeks to adjust to the situation, because I’m very active anyway. I don’t like spending a lot of time in the house.

I’m always on the go. Even when I’m at home in Ireland, if I have a few spare hours, I’ll always go and meet someone or go and do something. I never really just sit around and do nothing.

So that took me a couple of weeks to get used to, but we got into a routine then and it was grand.

I didn’t play any golf for six weeks so I’m itching to get back into tournament play this week at the Charles Schwab Challenge and really missed the game towards the end of lockdown.

It was the longest I’ve ever gone without having a club in my hand.

I actually got to watch The Sopranos for the first time. The whole six series! There were around 86 episodes so it took three or four weeks to get through them all so that was good. It passed a lot of time.

I didn’t watch a lot of sport. The odd time I’d find myself flicking around on YouTube maybe watching the GAA games or something. I did a bit of that but not a huge amount otherwise, to be honest.

And being in a professional sport that was in lockdown, there was always some planning going on so I was busy with Zoom calls and stuff.

I think we’ve all had enough of Zoom calls now though.

Hopefully we get back to some sort of normality now as the new season resumes on Thursday.