My judgment: I chose running first because it was the simplest way to keep myself moving. I later tested golf as something that could supplement it. What I found was a combination that asks very different things from my body and mind, yet somehow takes me to the same place.
Running and golf are almost comically opposite.
One requires almost nothing.
Shoes on. Go outside. Run.
The other can somehow convince a grown man to spend three nights researching the difference between two shafts before hitting essentially the same white ball.
Yet I chose both.
Not despite how different they are.
I kept them because they are different.
It started with running
In 2020, Covid stopped the world.
For the first time in a long while, I slowed down too.
Around then, I came across one of those ideas floating around the internet: we should have different hobbies serving different parts of our lives. One to make money. One to keep us fit. One to make us creative. One to grow our minds. One to bring peace or connection.
I don’t know if everyone actually needs five hobbies.
But it made me think about mine more deliberately.
For fitness, I chose running.
Running was almost too easy a decision. It is cheap, accessible and leaves very little room for excuses. Wear whatever you have. Put on some shoes. Walk downstairs.
Start.
I also like the feeling of simply going outside and moving through nature. There is something slightly wild and free about it.
At least until the body starts complaining.
There is always that unpleasant part when my legs begin to hurt, my breathing gets heavier and I start wondering why I voluntarily left the house.
Then the body settles.
I find a pace.
My attention narrows to my breathing, my footsteps and the road ahead.
Eventually, almost everything else disappears.
Running exhausts me into stillness.
But I cannot just keep running
I wanted to move regularly, but I knew I could not simply run hard every day.
I already have a slipped disc. My body has limits.
And I already knew other sports.
I played competitive basketball from my teens until National Service, while football was part of my weekends for almost a decade. I could have gone back to either.
But running was already giving me intensity. Basketball and football would have added more sprinting, impact and recovery demands.
If the answer to “I cannot run five times a week” was Hyrox, bodybuilding, wakeboarding or another hard sport, I would still be stacking intensity on top of intensity.
I needed something different.
Not something to replace running.
Something to supplement it.
That was when I began wondering whether golf could be that thing.
Golf wasn’t originally a love story
I first picked up golf for a practical reason.
I was working for a Japanese multinational. Golf was something some of my Japanese colleagues and clients enjoyed, and learning the game seemed like one more way to understand the people I worked with and perhaps help my career.
Very practical.
Very transactional.
I did not fall in love with it.
Years later, a friend asked me to go to the driving range after work.
We hit some balls.
And something changed.
There was a strange solace in standing there after a long day with only one immediate problem:
Hit this ball properly.
Work disappeared.
Everything disappeared.
I started going back.
At first, I was testing whether golf could sit beside running as another form of movement.
It could.
Not because golf gives me the same workout.
It doesn’t.
That is the point.
I can walk, rotate, swing, practise and spend hours outside without asking my body to do what running asks of it.
And then I realised the physical complement was only half the appeal.
Running removes variables. Golf adds them.
Running simplifies.
Golf complicates.
Lie. Slope. Wind. Distance. Club. Swing. Contact. Course management.
No two shots are exactly the same.
That makes golf irresistible to the part of me that likes researching, testing and understanding things.
I form a theory.
Try it.
Hit the ball.
Immediate feedback.
Sometimes the ball proves me right.
Quite often, it tells me I have absolutely no idea what I am talking about.
Then I go back and learn again.
Golf also gives my perfectionism somewhere to go.
Which is funny, because golf may be one of the worst possible sports for a perfectionist.
Nobody really masters it.
You can practise relentlessly and still hit a terrible shot. You can play beautifully one week and wonder whether you have ever held a golf club before the next.
So golf lets me chase perfection while repeatedly reminding me that perfection is unavailable.
Maybe I need that too.
Opposite routes to the same place
This is what eventually convinced me that the combination worked.
Running removes variables until there is almost nothing left.
Golf gives me so many variables that there is no room to think about anything else.
One makes my body work harder.
The other shifts more of the challenge towards skill, coordination and thought.
Yet both take me somewhere remarkably similar.
When I run well, there is only the next step.
When I golf, there is only the next shot.
One exhausts me into stillness. The other concentrates me into stillness.
For someone whose brain usually has several tabs open at the same time, I value that enormously.
I am not trying to choose a favourite sport.
I am building a combination I can hopefully sustain for decades.
Running gives me exertion, cardiovascular fitness, freedom and a simple marker of physical capability. I don’t need to become an elite runner. I just want to remain someone who can run.
Golf gives me movement of a different kind, endless learning and a skill I can spend the rest of my life trying to improve.
One harder.
One gentler.
One simple.
One ridiculously complicated.
Both capable of growing with me.
That does not mean either gets a lifetime contract. If running eventually becomes bad for my body, I will taper down or stop. If golf stops giving me what I value from it, I will reconsider that too.
I am not loyal to the sports at the expense of myself.
I am loyal to what they give me.
Movement. Learning. Solace. Challenge.
I chose running first.
I tested whether golf could sit beside it.
Years later, I realised I had found a pairing that works precisely because neither tries to be the other.
So I choose both.