FORE!

Watching last weekend’s Masters Tournament from Augusta National Golf Club (which IMHO is one of the great TV spectator events in all of sport), I got to thinking about how to blend two of my favorite activities, bicycling and golf. Though the two sports might seem like a bit of a mismatch--sort of like pairing me with Tiger Woods for 18 holes at Pebble Beach--their participatory wells are not mutually exclusive. I personally know at least two people other than myself who enjoy both biking and bunker-avoidance behavior. Heck, even some very well-known cyclists like to get out and swing a club now and then. (In case you don’t recognize him, his initials are L.A.)

The TowCaddy is one option for getting your aerobic spin in before and after a round of golf. It’s the brainchild of Howard Fullmer, a Utah-based illustrator who does work for Adventure Cyclist magazine. “Originally, I just wanted something to get me to the course without having to drive or use gas,” Fullmer said. “But we also designed it to be one of the smoothest non-motorized pull carts on the market.” I’m wondering if you couldn’t take it a step further and use the entire bike-and-TowCaddy setup as a replacement for an electric or gas-powered golf cart. With a bike boasting extremely fat tires, like the Surly Pugsley, you might even be permitted to take the entire rig off the cart paths and onto the fairways. (I’m already mentally designing a shoe with a sole that combines a pedal cleat and soft spikes.)

Perhaps no one has linked together golf and bicycling to the extent that the 40 Over Par boys from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, have. In 2005 they pedaled the Southern Tier Route, hauling their clubs from San Diego to St. Augustine, Florida, stopping at more than two dozen golf courses along the way. Two summers later they biked and chipped their way along the west coast of Portugal. (For their 2008 tour of the West Coast of America, they swapped golf clubs for an 800-pound gorilla, but that’s another story.)

Maybe this is all pointless. After all, there are those who argue that bicycling is the new golf, when it comes to professionals networking in the great out of doors.

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Biking Without Borders is written by Michael ‘Mac’ McCoy, Adventure Cycling’s field editor. It appears weekly, highlighting a little bit of this or a little bit of that--just about anything, as long as it’s related to traveling by bicycle.