— the 2010 Tarawera Ultramarathon

20 April 2010

By CAPT Scott McIntyre

There are endurance runners who push themselves beyond marathons, beyond back-to-back marathons and into a whole new world of hurt.

100km—a leisurely hour’s drive or so, but not so leisurely when you’re covering Rotorua to Kawerau on foot.

The Tarawera Ultramarathon is a point-to-point trail run from Rotorua to Kawerau. The run starts at The Redwoods in Rotorua and skirts around Lakes Tikitapu (Blue Lake), Okareka, Okataina and Tarawera before following the Tarawera River to the finish in Kawerau.

This year’s entries were six two-person relay teams, 14 four-person relay teams, 45 solo 60km km runners, 46 80km solo runners and 60 100km solo runners.

Before the Tarawera Ultra, the longest distance I’d covered was 60 km (Rimutaka Incline to Petone); the longest time spent on my feet was almost 12 hours during last year’s 25th year anniversary 51km Kaweka during atrocious weather. Either way, I somehow convinced myself that 100km was within my grasp, and adopted Mallory’s sound reasoning of ‘because it’s there’ (his answer to why was he attempting to climb Mt Everest in 1924).

I fronted up at 0630 to the start line at the Redwoods in Rotorua with Hayden Kana from Defence House; Hayden was doing his first ‘really long’ run of 60km. My support crew of Adrienne and the Hilux stocked with all sorts of goodies/remedies would meet us at most of the 12 aid stations.

Paul Charteris, the race director, started us at 0700. Following the advice of Kerry Suter, last year’s winner, most of us started slowly using the first uphill as a good warm-up. The pack started to thin out fairly quickly, and we ended up in a group of half a dozen or so who would stick fairly close together to the finish.

The first 55km dealt to the nastiest of the hills, particularly the short, steep climbs and tricky single track of the Eastern and Western Okataina Walkways. We also literally picked up Warren, a Kiwi living in Brisbane. He’d run out of ‘go’, almost stumbled off the track and into the river, and was in a bad way. He made it to the next aid station, fuelled up, and stuck near us until the finish.

Running into the aid station at the Tarawera Falls marked the finish of the 60 km event and a mental turning point for those of us going further. Hayden had a mental glitch here, and gave up the opportunity to stop running with ‘I think I’ll do the 100 km’. With that and the worst behind us, we were over half way and ‘only’ had an easy 40 k to go.

Or so we thought. 100m or so down the track, we turned right and started a series of slow grinding, energy-sapping uphill forestry tracks. Our pace fell off, but we stuck to maintaining a good effort. You can’t run 100km non-stop, so we adopted the approach of power walking up hills if we couldn’t run them, and running whenever we could.

A long speedy descent into the Titoki aid station made up some lost time. The 80 km runners turned off here, and we trudged off along more dusty forestry trails to do a 20 km diversion.

Part of this was a 5.3 km loop after the Awaroa aid station—a nice flat bit, and then the pink route markers did a left hook up a steep hill. We grovelled up through loose gravel and sand, slowly getting roasted in very un-Wellington weather, and not a puff of breeze to cool us down.

Leaving Awaroa we climbed the last major hill and started a net downhill to the Fisherman’s Bridge aid station. Here we met up with the Tarawera River again, and the realisation sank in that the finish was only 9 km away after almost 12 hours on the go. This last bit was flying past until some ‘mountainous’ steps appeared out of nowhere up onto a bridge over the river and we were cursing Paul yet again. Curses faded to smiles on the other side of the bridge, with only a kilometre or so left. Daylight ran out about here, and we dropped the pace a bit until Warren’s family gave him a headlight. Glo-sticks had marked the track, but these represented ‘entertainment’ for the Kawerau kids and most had disappeared.

With 500 m to go, I almost ran into the timber zigzag anti-motorbike gate. After untangling myself, I looked up to see Hayden sprinting away from Warren, and I took off after them. I may’ve elbowed Warren’s pacer a bit to get past as I sprinted down the finish chute to cross in just under 13 hours, 15th out of the 37 100 km finishers.

And in case you’re wondering, Kerry Suter retained his title and took out the 100 km event in 9hr48, more than an hour over his nearest rival.

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