My colleague Kristen asked me once how much golf I play during the year. I thought about it for a second, couldn’t come up with specific answer and could really only say, “A lot.”

I hadn’t really thought about it that way. I had never truly tracked just how much I teed it up in a year. So when 2012 began, I was set on changing that.

Using a very high tech method of writing down all of my rounds in a Moleskin calendar notebook, I set out to chronicle my 2012.

The golf year started on Friday, March 2 when I flew from Minneapolis to Houston, grabbed my clubs and a rental car and headed directly to 36-hole Cypresswood Golf Club and played the Keith Foster-designed Tradition course there before going to see the Houston Rockets and Denver Nuggets play that night.

Nine months to the day later — Sunday, Dec. 2 — I played my final round of the year. The finale was a nice walk at Corte Bella, a decent little housing development course in Sun City West, Ariz. It was a great year.

In that span, I played at least nine holes of golf on 126 occasions. At one stretch I played at least one of the weekend days on 31 consecutive weekends. I usually got out for some golf two or three nights a week after work, even if it was just for nine holes. I played 35 different courses in seven different states and only probably only two courses were bad.

Here are the totals:

126 days of golf

2,128 holes played

1677 holes were played while walking

407 holes were played while riding

78.8 percent of my holes for the year were played walking

Using a conservative estimate that 18 holes walking is equal to five miles, I walked a little more than 465 miles on the golf course. To put that into perspective, that is greater than the distance from my house to Chicago.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll chronicle some of the highlights of the year. But let’s just say it was a great year of golf.