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Peter Frick-Wright: From ���ϳԹ��� Magazine, this is the ���ϳԹ��� Podcast.

Everyone has that one friend. They’re funny, they’re clever, there’s a light in their eyes, everyone enjoys being around them. They have all the talent and natural ability in the world, and they could really be making something of themselves if they weren’t flushing it all away on their addiction. To golf.

My friend’s name is Alex Ward. And he also makes podcasts. In fact, he’s a regular contributor to this podcast. And here at ���ϳԹ���, we have exactly two rules. First rule, don’t call it “Outdoors Magazine.” Second rule: we acknowledge the existence of golf once every two years.

Most of the time, when a writer takes on golf, the story follows the same arc: a defense of the sport; an argument for its relatedness to the outdoors; an explanation of how and why this silly game is so fun, or addictive, or all-consuming that it’s displaced the “real” sports the writer used to enjoy.

I’ve known Alex for a long time. And he too used to enjoy other things. He’s a former river guide, he plays basketball, helps coach a kid’s chess club, and you should see him roller skate. But nothing has gotten hold of him quite like golf.

For the last few years I’ve been trying to get Alex into running. It’s cheap, it’s healthy, the water it requires is measurable in ounces, rather than acre-feet. Sometimes, a big group of our friends will sign up for a race and invite him to train for it. Sometimes he does it. And he does fine. But then it’s back to golf.

A while back, Alex said he wanted to do a story about his relationship with running. How he keeps trying to pick it up but it never quite becomes a habit.

“Sounds great,” I said.

“By the way, when was the last time ���ϳԹ��� did a story about golf?” He asked.

“About two years ago,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” he said.

Here’s Alex.

Alex Ward: I don’t have a good relationship with running. And I really should. I’ve had really good role models. Dad ran marathons when I was growing up. Mom always had regular running meetups in the neighborhood. My brother ran cross country in high school. I’ve even worked for several running podcasts over the years. And yet I’ve always friend-zoned running. Never fell in love with it, just wasn’t my thing.

Team sports, usually basketball, that’s my speed. I like the act of running. I even love it. But mostly just to play and have fun with friends or teammates. I’ll run the occasional race here and there, but it’s mainly for the social part of it. To be totally honest, I just plain don’t like going for a run.

But now I’ve hit an age, 35, where I’m just starting to notice that all the stuff I used to do, is harder to do. I broke my leg in 2020, and the recovery from that cost me a year and a half of doing pretty much anything. I used to play basketball constantly, and now it’s more like, occasionally I play basketball. Backpacking trips are harder to schedule. The waves never seem to cooperate when I want to get out and go surfing. I’ve also got a kid on the way that will poke some serious holes in all of the above. A void in my overall exercise, a scary scary void, has emerged.

Then one day,  some friends invited me out golfing. It was about a year or so into the pandemic, and a lot of people were picking up golf. That’s because you couldn’t design a more perfect activity for COVID rules at the time. It takes place outside, you never have to get within 6 feet of someone, and it’s a social game. Plus, it takes a lot of time, which people suddenly had a lot more of.

Standing on the first tee box that day, overlooking a beautiful course, a hibernating golf bear stirred and woke up inside me. I’d played the game when I was a kid, my grandparents on both sides loved golf and it trickled down to me. I really liked it, but then I moved onto other sports and hadn’t really swung a club in almost 20 years.

But after that first round back, I knew I would not friend-zone golf. I was smitten.

You might have heard a speech from someone before about why they love golf. Golfers love talking about it. Maybe it was a drunk cousin or uncle at a wedding. I’ll spare you the long version and give you two reasons why I love golf. At it’s core, it’s about finding balance between yourself and the land around you, trying to find order in chaos. It’s why I also like surfing. Every wave, every golf hole are completely unique.  You have to be really present and in tune with what’s happening around you to do well in either one. In my case for both it’s a lot of failure, but when it goes right, there’s nothing like it. It’s an incredibly fun game and a really beautiful setting. Hard to beat.

The other reason I love golf, which I say with complete sincerity, it’s about the friends you make along the way. Like my buddy Matt.

Matt Lynch: My name is Matt Lynch. I’m a golf addict. And…

Alex: Hi, Matt.

Matt: Hi, my name is Matt, and I’m a golf addict.

Alex: I got randomly paired up with Matt at a local tournament once, and we hit it off right away, and much to our partner’s dismay, we’ve been golf mistresses ever since.

Alex: Is that the right way to describe our relationship, would you say?

Matt: Yeah, I would think so.

Alex: Like, we only do one thing when we get together.

Matt: I have you in my phone as just an initial. Just A.

Alex: One thing we had in common was the ability to convince ourselves that golf is exercise, and maybe even all the exercise we’d need.

Matt: Like, I'm not a natural exerciser. I was in much better shape when I was in high school. And then, you know, work, work, work like anybody else. Hard to find exercise, golf feels like exercise. You look down at your phone and you're like, holy shit, I just walked five, seven miles, burned 2500 calories, something like that. Like, that sounds pretty good. I had a great time.

Alex: Oh man, I’ve never burned that many calories golfing. That’s crazy

Matt: You should play like me, gets the heart rate up.

Alex: Walking 5-7 miles several days a week would be a fantastic amount of exercise, but that much golf isn’t realistic. It’s expensive. It takes too long. So the question was, how could we make the golf we do play real exercise?

One day, Matt stumbled upon a YouTube video by a group called No Laying Up about a golfer doing something called a 100 Hole Hike.

YouTuber: Approaching hole number 99. We’ve got two left. I’m hurting, Sunburned. I’m battling my shvonz off right now.

Alex: 100 holes of golf in a single day, all walking, no carts, start to finish.

To put that in perspective, 100 holes would be about five and a half full rounds of golf. On a regulation 18-hole course, you’re looking at 30-35 miles of walking, which would be a good day for a seasoned through-hiker on the PCT.

Alex: when you heard about the hundred hole hike, was any part of that like, actually the physically hard part of this is good for me. I want to do more of this?

Matt: Yeah, for sure. I think it was like this hike was coming up at the, you know, just after my 39th birthday. And I've kind of said that I need to, like, when I go into my forties, I wanna be in the best shape of my life. I don't know if we're gonna do that, but I know that we need to like start the descent angle, uh, at least.

Alex: Sure.

Matt: Start neutralizing that. And so for, for sure, that was like, part of my motivation was that my 39th birthday would kind of start me on a better path, uh, towards, towards my goals. Ultimate goals.

Alex: So Matt signed up for the hike, which was put on by a nonprofit called Youth On Course. Their goal is to provide subsidized golf access for kids and teenagers that might not otherwise get the opportunity.

Based on the fundraising tier that Matt was in, the closest hike would be in San Jose, California at a regulation course. But since Matt ended up being the only person who’d committed to that hike, Youth On Course sent him to the next one on the schedule, at Trinity Forest Golf Club in Dallas. I decided to tag along and document the day, and off we flew to Texas.

There was a group dinner the night before the hike, where the dozen participants met each other and got briefed by the organizers. It was there we learned that we’d be playing on the par 3, 9-hole course. Which meant a much shorter course with average hole lengths of 80-140 yards. 100 holes of par 3 golf would be in the 15-18 mile range.  It would not quite be the full-course physical challenge we’d anticipated. This was the first curveball we would be thrown.

The other one was the weather.

Alex: It was like the weather gods heard about it. They were like, which days are they coming? All right, let's, let's circle those three days.

Matt: Yeah. It was beautiful the week before. Beautiful the week after.

Alex: Yeah. Right. Let's, how about high sixties, low seventies? No wind, sun clear. But those three days, let's switch it up.

Matt: And it was just biblical rain.

Alex: The weekend leading into the hike, there was flooding all over Dallas. Homes were being evacuated, cars were being washed away, and the Trinity River broke over the levees.

Newscast: The rain was so bad in Fort Worth that it caused the Trinity to top a levee right near downtown. I’ve never seen it go over that levee for as many years as I’ve been over there.

Alex: The temperature then dropped into the 30s. It was all totally unprecedented in Dallas.

Matt: But I think, um, I think we were on it, like we had the right mindset, like, we're gonna do this anyway. And it was not an easy day by any means still. But I think that we were prepared to go hole by hole and get the job done.

Alex: Thankfully, the rain cleared up for the day of the hike, but it was still 34 degrees out with 20-30mph winds when we pulled up to the course.

Matt: You know, we teed off at, I wanna say like 8:30 or 8:45 or something like that.

Alex: That's right.

Matt golfing: Whoo! There’s a hole there. We are off to an electrifying start out here.

Alex golfing: This is whipping out here.

Alex: Uh, teed off kind of just people sort of scattered into the wind. We were off.

Matt golfing: 500 from 135 yards, and just blew it off the planet. We’re gonna take it on the drop.

Alex: It took us both a little time to find the swing on that day. It's just, just took a while to get the engine kind of, kind of warmed up and going.

Matt: Yeah. And again, you're not really knowing what you're playing for. This is my first time there. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be keeping score, if I'm supposed to be keeping time or anything like that.

Alex: In my head before this, it was like, alright, we're gonna have a thing. It's counting. We're gonna like be counting our holes. We're gonna have a thing. We're gonna be keeping very detailed score of this whole thing, how much we're over under. We're gonna know exactly how many holes we've done. We're gonna know exactly where we're gonna know the course. Exactly. And just like, none of that was true.

Matt: Yeah, once we realized that that was not the case, it was quickly Okay. Like, we're gonna not be putting these things out so we're not lining things up. We're not, we're moving as fast as possible.

Alex: The purist golf approach we’d anticipated was not possible. Because of how the course was set up, other groups were playing 3-4 holes at a time, hitting from one spot to multiple other greens, then rotating around and finishing up their putts.

Which meant that after a few 9-hole loops, we were falling way behind.

Alex golfing: End of loop 4 check in. How are you feeling.

Matt golfing: 36 holes in, we’re good. That would just be a really long day of golf, but we did it in 3 hours. We started at 10. It’s about 1. I’d say that we gotta go faster. We gotta find some of what these guys are doing, but I’m not willing to just play 3 holes in a row. I’m not willing to hit 2 balls to the same thing and putt ‘em twice and call that two.

Alex golfing: A cultural divide has emerged here in four rounds here on the course.

Alex: It didn’t take us long to realize we were gonna have to play the way they were playing to finish roughly when everyone else did.

Matt: We were hitting golf shots. But I think that the purest level, like you're saying, of playing a hundred holes of golf, legit, we had to kind of bury our dreams a little bit.

Alex: At a certain point we accepted that. Um, I'll tell you what though, just from the golf side, once we were out there and doing it, I mean, I was having a ball. Like we got to hit so many wedge shots. I could roll tape of just, of just all the shots we took. So many.

And then on the kind of kick your ass physical side we were looking for, I mean, where, where were you at like two thirds of the way through? Were you starting to, did you ever start to feel like, man, my body's I'm pushing myself to the limit here?

Matt: No, I mean, for, I would say for sure I was done. Like, I was definitely tired. I was cold. I was spent, we walked a lot. I mean, it wasn't, but I've definitely felt more tired walking after 36 holes than I felt, you know, walking off that. I think for sure, like I said, the elements that day were tough. It was cold. It was dry, but you're just getting blasted with like 50 mile an hour winds in the face. It was, it was tough. But, am I gonna call that endurance golf? No.

Alex: All in all, the hike took about 7 hours, which is about 3 hours longer than the average round of 18 holes. And while it was really fun to be out there making it up as we went, fighting the weather, it wasn’t quite the challenge we’d anticipated.

Matt: Like, I wanted to pick myself off the 18th green for the fifth time of the day, you know, and, and say, Hey man, you better get your ass in gear. Like if you wanna do this into your seventies, like you better be able to, to do this now.

Alex: It was a bit of a bust. However, there was one shining bright spot in the day. At least for me.

You’d said the night before, uh, you said quote, well, I asked you what if you get a hole in one tomorrow? And you said, “I can't even really think about that. Uh, obviously I'd love it. Then you said, “if you get one, I'm just done. I'm out.”

Matt: I'm happy you've given me this platform to formally, um, resign my hopes and dreams.

Alex: On the 87th hole out of 100, I hit a little 110 yarder, blind shot over a hill. It felt perfect coming off the club.

Matt golfing: That’s looking good. We might need to go.

Alex golfing: Don’t fuck with me, are you fucking serious?

Matt golfing: That’s a blind shot!

Alex: It was my first hole-in-one ever, which is a big moment for a golfer. Although in my book, it doesn’t really count as a true hole in one. It wasn’t even on an official hole, I wasn’t playing a real round of golf, and it wasn’t on a regulation course. Still, it was one hell of a door prize.

In a way it kind of represented the entire 100 hole hike endeavor for Matt and I. It was really fun in the moment, very unexpected, but not quite the real thing. It wasn’t what we were  chasing.

After the break, I find something to chase that I’m going to be chasing for a long time.

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Alex: So there we were, still yearning for a version of this game that would kick our ass.

And then, sitting around after the Dallas trip, scrolling through my golf-infested Instagram feed, I saw something that stopped me dead in my swiping. Something wild, untamed, and totally unique. An account called SpeedgolfRob.

SpeedgolfRob: Here I have in my hand a rather large rock. If you say to me…

Alex: To give you the picture, Rob is standing out in a vast, rocky field in West Ireland, nobody else around. He’s throwing stuff and screaming good golf advice into the wind.

SpeedgolfRob: We’re gonna go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth!

Alex: With his massive red beard and wild hair, he looked like a guru that emerged from an Irish bog one day and picked up a club, ready to preach golf wisdom to nobody and everybody. But mostly to undisciplined amateurs looking for golf advice, who he gives the shorthand nickname, Marooch.

SpeedgolfRob: I need you to move, Maroochie. I need you to move, Marooch.

Alex: In real life, Rob is a relaxed and friendly guy. He’s also one of the world’s best at speedgolf, a form of golf where you combine your score with the time it takes you to complete the round. Players only take a few clubs, and they run shot to shot. And they play a full round of 18-hole golf. So if you shot a 75 in 45 minutes, add those up. Your score is 120 In the last two years alone, he's won the US, UK, and Ireland speedgolf opens. He was the guy we wanted to talk to. So Matt and I called him up at his home in Galway.

Rob: My name is Robert Hogan, and I’m a maniacal speed golfer. I prioritize speed. I’m in a rare group of people for whom playing as fast as possible has been an obsession for years. You know, who, who, who's to say that speed golf for anything other than the maniacal, obsessive, like myself cannot be, you know, a round of golf and the best golf score in under 90 minutes wins. You know, late in the evening in the summertimes in Ireland, oftentimes I'd tee off at 10:00 PM and play 18 holes of golf.

Alex: How did it find you or when did you first start speed golf?

Rob: Well, as I say, I, I would've read about it and I, I remember, resonated with me straight away. It was the most craziest thing. I really just felt like it was something I wanted to try.

So, uh, in 2008 and 2009, I was the idiot in Ireland playing speed golf on his own. And I did a couple of charity exhibitions.

I was a professional golfer at the time, struggling in local tournaments. And I played the first three holes, not so well. It was a shock to the system. And then the last 15 holes of that round, which I played in 50, um, 53 minutes or something like that, I went on to play by far the best golf of my life. It wasn't even close, which was certainly very interesting and shocking.

Alex: I had a similar feeling when I watched a video of Rob playing in a speedgolf tournament. Deep down, I felt a pull that I needed to try it. This was real exercise, sure, but it also looked like it all took place in a kind of flow state. And I wanted that.

The mental side of golf can be torturous. Overthinking shots, standing over your ball with thoughts racing through your brain, trying to remember all the swing mechanics in the right order. It can all ruin a day on the course.

What if you just didn’t do any of that? What if you just ran up to the ball and hit it?

Rob: Things became simpler and about movement and just rhythm, and it was totally different. And I, no, no way. It was so profound and obvious. It was no way, it was a coincidence.

Alex: Since his first round, Rob has become an elite speed golfer. His personal best is a 109, when he shot a 75 in 34 minutes. And he does this carrying only three clubs in a holster on his waist: a driver, a 7 iron, and a wedge.

I need you to understand how crazy that is. 75 is an insanely good score for any amateur golfer walking and using a full set of clubs taking their time. For instance, my average best score is around an 82. And the difference between 82 and 75 is massive, much less doing it in 34 minutes with three clubs!

A standard length golf course is about 6-7 miles, depending on the distance between holes. So to run that as fast as Rob did while playing a full round of very good golf seems completely unreal.

So, to see just how real it is, I decided I’d have to try a round of speedgolf myself. And to do that, I needed Rob to help me set a goal.

Alex: So, okay. I need to ask you this 'cause I, as I prepare to try this myself, which will be documented on this episode. But, um, so for me, I'm about a 10 handicap. I can run about a, a nine to a nine and a half minute mile pace. Uh, so yeah. What, what, what goal should I shoot for?

Rob: First time out? I can see the score being in, in and around the same.

Alex: Really? Yeah. So you think I could shoot mid eighties in an hour?

Rob: I do. Yeah. I think especially the, the long game, you can be very surprised with how well you hit the ball.

Alex: I am not as optimistic, uh, as you Rob. That sounds difficult.

Rob: Keep, keep moving through to round, you know, you know, I'll just keep, try and keep it, you know, keep it moving. When you're moving from running into your shot, into running, keep that whole process moving. You know, you, you know, just try and make it one movement for an hour. Yeah. Try and it's not really stopping and starting at all. It's one move the whole way through. Um, and if you can, if you can be efficient with your shots, that's really the key. If you can save five seconds per shot, that's not five seconds, that's five seconds times 84. Yeah? That's, that's the key. You gotta, if you gotta be efficient, you gotta put your bag down, put your bag down in a proper position, one look and then trust it and go. One look, trust it, and go.

Alex: But if I've never done this before, Rob, I mean, what are my, what are my chances you think of succeeding?

Rob: So when I used to go out the door to a golf tournament, my dad used to say, if you don't win, don't bother coming home. So if you don't go under 150, don't bother coming home.

Alex: Okay. 150. That'd be awesome.

So there it was, I had a goal to beat. 150, which would be shooting a 90 in 60 minutes. Or 91 in 59, or 89 in 61, or you get the idea.

Although it felt like a real stretch I thought I had a  puncher’s chance at actually hitting this. The golf part was doable. I was more worried about the running and keeping my heart rate down enough to hit a clean golf shot.

I asked Matt if he wanted to join as well, but golf at a really fast pace didn’t grab him like it did me.

Matt: I don't wanna do it fast. Uh, I don't want to run outta breath doing it. Uh, I'm not a runner. I'm six four and my knees are probably like one drainage pipe away from just going away. So we're, we're not out there trying to like that's a, that's like a normal cautionary thought that I have just walking. So running like, no. We're not doing that.

Alex: All right, I'll, I'll pick up the running slack.

Matt did say he’d come along to follow me in a cart, so he could keep score and record me in the process.

We picked a course we liked and thought I would do well on. We grabbed the first tee time of the day at 7:50 am, so no one would be ahead of us, and set off on a cold January morning.

Matt golfing: Morning!

Alex golfing: Morning. Oh my god.

Just like Dallas, it was very cold and had been raining very hard the previous three days. Unlike Dallas though, the ground remained wet and soggy. My footsteps were splashy as I walked to the first tee to start.

Alex golfing: It’s soggy!

I had an ultralight golf bag with 4 clubs - a driver, hybrid iron, 8 iron, and a sand wedge. The old guys teeing off behind me gave me some weird looks. Why would you want to play fast? In running shorts, when it's 38 degrees out?

Guys, I dunno. But it was time to go.

Alex golfing: Yeah!

Matt from the cart: Hell yeah!

Alex: My adrenaline was pumping pretty hard, I swung out of my shoes and topped my first shot about 20 yards.

I did the same on my second shot too. But my third shot? I found the rhythm and stuck a wedge shot to 8 feet, then hit the putt to save a bogey.

With my nerves settled, I was off. I’ll let Matt’s reactions from the cart tell the story of the round.

Matt from the cart: You did just fine. Sit down. Standing water relief. That hurts a little. Yep, that’s one way to do it. Are you fucking kidding me right now? Hit 3. Let’s go. Easy par. Oh, off the back. Sting piece. Sit down. Brutal. Brutal. That sounded good. Dude, that’s a still good 6. Crisp, crisp. Peter piper. You’re at 21 minutes, that's a great pace. Great pace. Drops it right into the middle. Dead center middle.

Alex golfing: One left!

Matt from the cart: Wow. Whoo hoo. This is a big fucking hill right there. Oh my god that looks good. That’s so good.

Alex golfing: Straight up 4.

Matt from the cart: Straight 4 on the first through the gauntlet. Really regretting not bringing that putter?

Alex: In the end, I hit my last putt on the 18th hole at the 68-minute mark, while shooting a 93 for a total speedgolf score of 161. 11 over my goal of 150.

Alex golfing: Oh my goodness, dude. You know, I think. I thought it would be the running that got me. But the old mistress strikes again.

Matt from the cart: It was the golf. Strikes again.

Alex: Weirdly enough, for someone as competitive as me, I didn’t feel disappointed afterwards. Maybe it was just that I’d never done it before, so just completing it, learning from my mistakes, and setting the bar was enough.

Matt: To be honest, you didn't, you didn't hit that many bad golf shots, especially considering most of them were due to the conditions.

There was nothing that I would've suggested of somebody that was running up to a ball and trying to hit it that would've been like, shake it outta bounds. Didn't happen. Like, there was a lot of stuff. I'm like, wow, this could have been way worse.

Alex: It's a good way to look at it.

Matt: And when you run like I do, then you might understand why. I feel like it's almost physically impossible to do it in an hour anyway, even if you're not hitting golf shots. But I think you, I think you came and did it. We didn't hit the goal. We didn't get the goal.

Alex: No.

Matt: You weren't like way outside of it. It's not like you said, Hey, I'm gonna shoot a 86 and do it in an hour and shot a 120 and did it in an hour and a half. Like you were really close to it.

Alex: Yeah, I didn't hit that goal, but my eyes are open and I'm like, okay, I see the path to achieving that goal and then continuing to drop that number. I can lower that score down without necessarily shooting better golf. You know what I mean? Like, I can run better, I can get healthier. I can become a better runner and improve that way. Versus I, like, I don't think golf works quite that directly. Like the improvement takes so much time in such small increments that like manifest themselves in totally different ways over the course of like years. So, and, and same with a hundred hole hike. I think putting the boundary on it and making it that physical challenge can kind of jumpstart you, your golf brain into like rewiring itself a little bit. Which is, which is healthy.

Matt: Yeah. And obviously I'm not training to go play a hundred holes of golf in a day as my outcome. It's more that you need to stretch and work out in order to be able to do that. So if that's your motivation to get you to do that, so you can just go play 18 holes of golf, you know, that's what you have to do.

Alex: Driving back from the course after the speedgolf round, I got really excited thinking about trying it again. Finding the tactical balance between running fast and playing controlled golf was fascinating.

But if I was going to practice fast golf, I needed to practice getting faster, not just the golf. And suddenly, a feeling I’d never had popped up inside me. I want to go running. I want to get better.

It’s too early to tell if endurance golf has repaired my relationship with running. But I can say that for the first time in my life, I want to try and fix it.  And maybe I can finally join my family and my friends, who’ve been waiting for me to catch up.

Thanks to Stone Creek Golf Club in Oregon City for hosting the speedgolf, and thanks to Youth On Course for being so generous with our 100 Hole Hike effort.

If you’d like to find a Hundred Hole Hike near you, you can visit the YouthOnCourse link in the episode description.

You can follow Matt Lynch on his YouTube channel @golfcrack, where you can find a video of me doing the speedgolf run along with Matt’s other golf adventures.

Rob Hogan is on Instagram and TikTok @ speedgolf rob. You can’t miss him.

This story was written and produced by Alex, with editing by me, Peter Frick-Wright. Music and sound design by Robbie Carver.

The ���ϳԹ��� Podcast is made possible by our ���ϳԹ��� Plus members. Learn more about all the benefits of membership at outsideonline.com/podplus.