Did you know that there is a US Open golf champion walking among us in Bermuda?

Chris Parry finished as low amateur and topped the leaderboard in the Masters Division at Temecula Creek Golf Club in California in August and followed up that success by finishing third overall at the British Speed Golf Championships at Sunningdale Heath.

Speed golf fuses two of Bermuda’s most popular pastimes — running and golf — into a single, breathless test of endurance and precision.

Golfers run the course, carrying a limited selection of clubs, with the aim of completing 18 holes as quickly as possible while keeping their score as low as possible. The two numbers — time and strokes — are then combined into a single aggregate score, meaning a golfer's fitness is every bit as decisive as their short game.

“The top guys in this sport are doing anywhere between 15 to 18-minute 5Ks, so running is obviously very important,” said Parry, 47, Global Head of RenaissanceRe Capital Partners.

“Then the golfers are a mixture of professionals and top amateurs, I play off scratch and can do an 18-minute 5K, so they are my two metrics.

“The best way to try and conceptualise for people is one minute equals one shot, so it's the aggregate of the two. If you did a 40-minute round and you shot 70, your speed golf score would be 110, so both disciplines are as important as one another.”

Parry's route into the sport came after years of running in Bermuda before a chance discovery online introduced him to a discipline that had been almost made for him.

“I’ve been running in Bermuda for years and years,” he said. “I got to a stage where I was enjoying the running but I was on social media about four years ago and speed golf popped up.

“I thought ‘wow, that’s great’ and it combines my two favourite disciplines so I thought I would give it a go.

“This is the third British Championships I’ve played in and I now compete globally. I really enjoy it and it’s just very fortunate that there is a sport that combines the two things that I’m OK at.”

Parry’s victory at the US Open has earned him a place on the Great Britain team for the World Championships in Auckland in November and he insists that despite all the focus on physical mechanics, mindset is just as important.

“The nice thing about speed golf is that because you’re running and playing so quickly, if you hit a bad shot or you do something that frustrates you, you forget about it immediately,” Parry said.

“You get to move on so quickly, which I think is the great thing about speed golf.”

Tucker's Point Golf Club has become something of a home base for his training and allow him to complete a full round before most of Bermuda has finished breakfast.

“Tucker's Point Golf Club has been incredibly supportive and has allowed me to train there on a Saturday morning,” he said.

“I tee off at 6.45am on a Saturday and then I’m done less than an hour later. It’s an incredibly efficient way of combining two sports and getting a workout as well as getting 18 holes of golf in.”

Parry also believes that the sport could catch on locally, given the love of running and golf on island. He is already working with the Bermuda Golf Association to try to bring a speed golf event to Bermuda, having found no shortage of interest among fellow runners on the island.

“When I speak to people in Bermuda, there are so many people who are super keen to participate,” he said.

“One of the things that I’m really trying to organise in conjunction with the BGA is a Bermuda speed golf event. Tucker’s Point have been supportive and the BGA have said that it will help, so I’m just hopeful that we can get a Bermuda event on the calendar.”

Format-wise, the sport varies by tournament. The British Championship condensed 36 holes into a single day on a shorter course, with the leading 20 players advancing through a cut, while the US Open that Parry won in July was spread over two days on a longer layout.

“The courses can be anywhere between three and a half to five miles long,” he said.

“So you’re combining that length of run with the golf and there’s different set-ups, but typically it would be two rounds, either on the same day or over a couple of days.”

There is also a family dimension to Parry's speed golf pursuits. He competed in the pairs event — an alternate-shot format featured at both the British and World Championships — alongside his son, Max, who has represented Bermuda at the North America Cup in his own right.

Approaching 50, Parry is well aware that he is competing against a field trending younger, with British Speed Golf actively working to grow both its professional ranks and youth participation — the recent British Championship featured five or six junior competitors.

“It’s obviously very difficult because I’m competing against 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds and players in their early forties,” he said.

“But once I hit 50, I can go into the Masters category, so that’s one benefit of getting slightly older. I do think that the sport will encourage younger participants, particularly because golf, for some, takes too long at four or five hours.

“If you can do it in a very short period of time, I think that will attract more interest from a broader set of individuals going forward.”

With the World Championships in Auckland now just weeks away, Parry's focus has narrowed entirely.

“The exciting thing now is just the World Championships in November, which I’m hard training for,” he said. “That should be fun.”