Hit and Run

Corey Cornacchio, a healthy 37-year-old athletic type of guy, monitors his heart rate when he golfs. Honest. OK, the Thousand Oaks resident is a marketing director for a major manufacturer of heart-monitoring devices.

But still--monitoring the heart rate while golfing? That’s like measuring the brain function of Wile E. Coyote when he’s got the Roadrunner in sight. It might register, but it sure won’t amount to much. At least under ordinary circumstances.

But, then, when Cornacchio steps on a golf course, it is not under ordinary circumstances.

Cornacchio is one of a small but gradually growing group of athletes who are combining the dramatically disparate sports of golf and distance running into one bizarrely competitive test of skill and endurance called Xtreme Golf.

A mix of professional, amateur and celebrity Xtremists began dashing across the 6,400-yard Camarillo Springs Golf Course early this morning in the one-day qualifying round of the Volkswagen Santa Monica Xtreme Golf Open. The top runner-golfers will return for the finals Aug. 21.

“Everybody I tell about it, they laugh,” said Cornacchio, whose performance in a recent tournament in Rancho Santa Fe automatically qualified him for the finals of the Camarillo event. “They can’t believe combining these two unlikely things. They think it’s hysterical.”

It may seem hysterical, but it’s tough work.

To succeed in Xtreme Golf, competitors--usually dressed in running shoes and medium-length shorts or sweatpants--must traverse a regulation 18-hole golf course (a distance of about five miles) as quickly as possible, in pursuit of a low golf score. The time and the score are simply added together for the final result. (A golf score of 80 in a time of 50 minutes equals a final result of 130.)

In the Rancho Santa Fe tournament in late July, Cornacchio shot a 90 in his final round, completing the course in 45 minutes and 44 seconds, about four hours faster than a routine round of golf. In the qualifying round, Cornacchio shot an 81 in 48 minutes.

“It’s great to get a round in under an hour, and I can tell you, my wife loves it,” Cornacchio said. “The first time I teed off I thought, ‘OK, what do I do here? Hit it and run?’ I guess I threw caution to the wind. I hit it and ran to it. I was able to get into a pace in a couple of holes.”

Tournament golfers tee off in three-minute intervals with the faster, often world-class runners and triathletes going out first to avoid congestion and mass mayhem.

In tournament play, golfers are allowed to bring along caddies, who have the benefit of a golf cart to help them keep pace with their partners. In less formal play, golfers go it alone, hauling three or four clubs the entire distance.

“When you’re a kid, there are things you’re not supposed to do,” said Bob Babbitt, a founder of the Xgolf Assn. and organizer of the speed tournaments. “You’re not supposed to yell in the library, you’re not supposed to run in the hallway, and you’re not supposed to run on the golf course. You should see the smiles of these people when they come off the course.”

Babbitt, the Solana Beach publisher of CitySports and Competitor magazines, said Xtreme Golf not only creates a novel challenge for runners and golfers, but adds fun to a game that he said has grown increasingly slow and tedious in recent years.

For Babbitt and the other Xgolfers, the speed game is far from dull.

“Man, I’m a warrior--I’ve gone to war playing golf. We’re trying to show it’s OK to enjoy yourself on the golf course,” said Babbitt, a triathlete and long-distance runner. “I actually like to go out there and have the sprinklers on full, run through the lagoon if they’ll let me and make the golf thing sort of an adventure.”

Sound a bit like “Animal House” meets “Caddyshack”?

“It’s intense,” said Jay Larson, one of the premiere Xgolfers. “I’m dead serious. I notice that about everybody who plays. They’re dead serious.”

Larson, winner of the professional division at Rancho Santa Fe, possesses ideal attributes for Xtreme Golf. The multi-sport athlete is a golf instructor who has competed in triathlons for many years. In 1986 he finished 11th in the most grueling of endurance tests, the Ironman Triathlon.

Like most competitors, Larson enters his tournament play with a definite strategy in mind: Hit the ball well, don’t think too hard and run at a good pace. Larson said he places a greater importance in playing a solid golf game than in running the course in record time.

“I just try to keep in mind that this is a golf tournament and I’m out there to shoot the best score I can shoot,” said Larson, who shot a 76 in 39 minutes, 39 seconds in Rancho Santa Fe--one stroke and 30 seconds over his personal best, considered by the Xgolf Assn. to be the professional world record. (Two amateurs in that same event beat Larson’s score, the lowest score a 74 in 38 minutes, 11 seconds.)

“Until people start getting faster and faster doing this thing, there isn’t a need for me to get too much faster,” said Larson. “I just want to make sure I stay in shape and I’m not sucking air by the ninth hole.”

Extreme golfers acknowledge that the faster pace of the game leaves little time to over-contemplate their shots. And that can be a good thing, as most hackers know.

Larson said, for many participants, scores are better in the quick game than in the slow game because they don’t have time to play mental games with themselves.

Larson thinks the combination of improved score and quicker playing times ultimately should attract golf traditionalists to the Xgolf game. But that’s well down the road. Tiger Woods and Greg Norman--though they are among the most fit golfers on the PGA tour--have yet to don their running shoes.

“There are a few guys on the PGA tour who would do just fine, but it’s hard to get to those people,” Larson said, adding that eventually “it’ll be easier getting to those people.”

For now, though, there are plenty of doubters.

“The whole concept seems kind of out of the normal,” said Dan Meeks, the resident golf pro at Camarillo Springs. “It seems like someone would do this to set some kind of [speed] record and that would be the only reason to do it.”

Meeks should know. A few years back, he was part of a group attempting to land itself in the Guinness Book of World Records for the quickest game of golf.

“I look at the [Xgolfer tournament] pretty simply,” Meeks said. “They’re a group of people who booked a tee time for a tournament and we’ll treat them like any tournament. If they want to be off the golf course in less than an hour, fine.”

On your marks, get set, putt.

BE THERE

The Volkswagen Santa Monica Xtreme Golf Open will be held from 6:30 to about 10 a.m. today at Camarillo Springs Golf Course, 791 Camarillo Springs Road. The celebrity and pro/am finals will be held at 6:30 a.m. Aug. 21. Spectator admission is free both days. Information: (619) 783-2711, Ext. 102.