Denise and myself made our way over the South Pacific ocean on Wednesday 7th March 4 days before this event. Wed night was spent in Auckland and Thursday we drove down to Rotorua. Nice place if you can handle the smell.
The Thursday night the organisers had put on a casual 7.5km funrun in the Redwood forests. Amazing soft trails! They bought over Anton Krupicka from the states who has raced and won many ultras in the states. After the run they put on the movie Endurance. Its a movie about the 2010 Western States ultra. Anton came 2nd that yr.
The morning of the race was pretty damn cold and for fear our car would get locked in the gates at 8:30pm (the race is a point to point so we wern't sure if we would be back in time) we parked our car about 1km from the starting line. Trying our best to keep warm we did a walk then a jog then waited until it was time to start before we ditched our warm clothes.
What an amazing technical race this is. It has it all. Nice forestry trails, nasty gravel trails, a little bit of road, lots and lots of technical tree roots trails, river crossings, running along cliff edges, some nice hills, some nasty hills, fallen trees, awesome aid stations, awesome volunteers, a great lead up to the race with a funrun and the Western States movie. Even the finishing medals were outstanding!
My race started off just as planned. I had 2 goals I wanted to reach. Sub 10hrs and a top 10 placing I got one of those goals.
We got to the start just before 6am and with the race stating at 7am we had just over an hour to go. I found it pretty cold waiting. After a quick pre race briefing we were lined up ready to go.
I wore a head torch for the first 4k as it was just a little dark in the forrest and put my trust in who ever I gave it to that my quite expensive AYUP head torch would find me at the finish. I'm glad to say it was!
I set myself about 5 rows back and just eased into it passing quite alot of runners. After about 30min or 40min I found myself up with the leading 100km runners. I was quite surprised at how easy the pace was. It was at one of the aid stations at about 19km I stopped to get the crap out of my shoe. Going through the river sections I got some stones etc in there. It was also at this stage I noticed my left calf feeling rather sore. I slowed down a bit to let it settle but as the run went on it just got worse. It wasn't long before I was on the tree roots and I reckon there was around 40km of tree root trails to run through which made it interesting. There was alot more hills than I expected also.
Not long before the 60k someone told me I was 27th. yukk! I've gone from about 6th or 7th down to high 20. By the time I made it to 60k I was in about 20th place. It was also here the first female came charging by!
I decided I better get my butt into gear.
Leaving the 60k we were on a gravel road then we started a climb. The more I climbed the hills the more my calf would spasm up. I found I could keep it at bay with salt tablets. Alot of the race is a bit of a blur after the 60k but I remember we started to make our way down hill and all of a sudden my calf came good. So while it felt good I ran a pretty good pace. I manged to catch up to alot of the other runners that passed me in the tree roots. Going up the hills now I had no problem running and passed alot as most were walking them.
The main hill is this 5km loop thats starts just before 80km. It was here my calf got really sore again and on that loop one other guy I passed and the chick caught back up to me. I found this hill quite good as it gave me a chance to break the run up with some walking. Back at the aid station my calf came good again so I took advantage of it and ran a nice steady pace dropping Nicola (the female runner) and the other guy. I got to 90km checpoint and only stopped for about 30sec. I made it there in 9hrs33min. There were 2 more drink stops between there and the finish. I only stopped at the last one. They tell me only 3km to go. That was a long 3km too. All this time I had no idea how close the girl and guy was behind me but knew if they can't see me they have no idea how far in front I was.
Finally I could see the finish line!
I finished in 10rs23min36sec and 7th place. Beating that guy by 2min and the girl by 3min.
Not the time I wanted but the placing was good :-)
Denise had a much better race than me. She raced the 60km and got 3rd female! Pretty darn impressive for running her first ultra and having suffered a calf injury for the 6 weeks prior to the race!
