With hours of stunning lake and riverside running, the Tarawera Ultra-marathon was awesome … but 80km is one hang of a long way.
- Jim Robinson. A competitor in the 2009 race and professional writer.
“This is a race I'll never forget. It’s memorable not just for its epic distance but for its mind-blowing scenery and terrain. There are only a handful of true ultra-marathons in New Zealand - I can see this one becoming a fast favorite. It's only a matter of time before the secret gets out. It’s one of the best trail runs in the country, no question.”
That’s how effusively Kerry Suter rated the Tarawera Ultra-marathon, after winning the 80km+ race in an impressive 7hrs 22min. Few would have disagreed with the Hamilton Hawk, although on the finish line, some expressed their praise with a more basic “damn that was hard!” Admittedly, the Rotorua to Kawerau course drops a total of 400m in elevation, but that statistic belies the fact that there are also hundreds of metres of climbing and perhaps 40km of the trails are pretty rugged. The stark truth is, only a handful of the runners finished inside 10 hours; some ran till twilight.
The big day started in the half-light of the giant Redwoods, with many wearing a headlamp. Across the categories, there were over 70 athletes. Keep in mind that the Hawkes Bay’s Triple Peaks was the same day, and this was the first Tarawera Ultra: clearly the allure, or insanity, of pushing personal limits to the maximum is not inconsiderable. Some were in for the 55km short (hah!) haul, others were in teams; but most were biting off the whole mighty shebang.
Padding off across a blanket of pine needles, following needles of torchlight, it was straight down to business. The course climbs 200m in the first 3km – a right grunt. Within 10 minutes the field was in ones and twos. But the air was cool and calm, absolutely perfect conditions.
Suter and Chris Morrissey led the way from the start. “I knew that outside the overwhelming distance, Chris would be the biggest challenge. We’ve raced against one another a handful of times before. He'd showed his caliber by smashing me each and every time,” reflected the Hawk. “Several times I looked at my [GPS] watch and wondered whether our pace would be sustainable. But I was sticking to my primary goal of keeping Chris close,” he noted.
The pair traded the lead for over two hours, around Blue lake and Lake Okareka. Suter would nudge away on the technical descents, Morrissey would power back on the climbs. But at 25km, on the western Okataina track, Suter broke the elastic – albeit thinking that Morrissey was still just behind.
“On the long descent to Okataina lodge I really got a chance to take the brakes off,” the 31-year-old said. At the lakeside, at 35km, he had a five-minute lead over Morrissey, with several more minutes back to one Jimmy “Jetpack”. Holding it steady not far behind that were Whakatane’s Jim Robinson and Jo Petersen, the latter a GP who each year contests an extreme marathon or ultra-marathon in some far flung corner of the globe. Petersen’s ticked Antarctica, Everest and Chile off his list of challenges; in May 2009 he’ll tackle 250km in the desert of Namibia (see jo4hospice.wordpress.com).
Okataina had one of 10 excellent aid stations, about one an hour. This one was staffed by Whakatane’s Phoenix Health Centre, where Petersen works. “The aid stations were outstandingly well stocked,” enthused Suter, who reckoned he got through his day on “nine litres of electrolyte drink, tube after tube of race gel, and enough cramp-stop spray to drop a horse.” The aid stations offered all runners Em’s Power Cookies and Bars, GU, lollies, bananas, chips and other snacks, plus water, coke and electrolyte drink. Just as well, too, because according to several online calculators, six to seven thousand calories is a fair estimation of day’s energy demand.
The next 25-odd kilometres over the Eastern Okataina walkway to Tarawera falls saw the roughest going. “I was convincingly demolished by Chris on some of it a year earlier so was reserved about my chances of maintaining what I assumed was a slender lead. I fell a few times, but continued to push as hard as I could,” said Suter. He’s tramped or run much of the Ultra course before so was familiar with probably around 80% of the trails. Maybe that helped, because he was actually pile-driving a huge lead over Morrissey, though he didn’t know it. “It's so hard to be out in front for these sorts of races. You never know what's happening behind you. It's horrid being the hunted!”
Mention is due here to the Ngati Tarawhai iwi, whose representative Manu Rangihiwia had welcomed runners to the race briefing, sharing some of the significance of the area. It was awesome having open access to these special trails. The iwi and DoC’s support was part of the deep enthusiasm, that enabled race inventor and director Paul Charteris to make the Ultra happen.
In his pre-race blurb, Charteris described the Tarawera Falls section of the trail as "some of the best trail running in the country”. He surely wasn't wrong. It was stunning running, even with the hurt of 50km in the legs. At the Tarawera Falls transition, Suter made a quick shoe change, to better suit the fast 25km of gravel roads into Kawerau. Morrissey was 30 minutes behind, fair to say, looking a tad weary.
That last 25km was dead easy, in pure technical terms. Physically, it was grindingly hard, even for Suter: “My legs started to really ache – there was pain with every stride. I knew if I ever slowed to a walk I'd never be able to run again, so I just had to keep turning my legs over. I'd make assumptions about how much time I had left in the race, then try and break it down into smaller more manageable segments,” he said.
“I've read that the first half of a race like that is run with your legs, the second half is run with your mind. I knew the most important thing to do is stay positive. I'd talk out loud, ‘Keep it up Kerry, you're doing fine. You're running well, keep your cadence up, relax and breath’,” he recalled.
Confirmation and confidence only came at the final aid station at 10km to go, when Suter was told he had at least 40 minutes’ lead on Morrissey. “The relief was huge. I raised my arms above my head and let out a meek cheer. But I was quickly back on my way.”
A last grunt over Reservoir Hill above Kawerau, and Suter was over Kawerau’s Prideaux Park finish line with a determined smile. The Hamilton Hawks 4x men team (Keith Hamill, Hugh Ratsey, Nick Sebastian, Garry Wilson) crossed the line soon afterwards in 7hrs 30min. The Hawks’ 4x women’s team (Rachel Bain, Tracey Greenwood, Rachel Sloan, Dawn Tuffrey) finished in 8hrs 05min.
Morrissey shuffled through the finish banners to take second individual in 8hrs 30min. He admitted he hadn’t done enough training; but his performance was still creditable. Robinson, who’d entered the 55km but carried on just for the hell of it, finished in 8hrs 47min; with Jimmy Jetpack (8hrs 49min) and Petersen (8hrs 51min) also besting the nine-hour barrier. A few minutes after that, Michelle Hyland and Gabby Rogers won the 2X team section.
The women’s individual race saw a storming run from Jean Beaumont, with a 9hrs 15min – like Suter’s time, that’s set the bar high for next year. Beaumont, from Porirua, was only two minutes behind her brother, Michael. She described it as the most beautiful run she has ever done. Billie Marshall was second woman in 9hrs 51min, with Whakatane’s Sarah Van der Boom third in 10hrs 33min.
Making Suter’s and Beaumont’s times even more impressive, according to several competitors with GPS watches, and marshals on bikes, the true distance was probably closer to 90km. Suter’s own GPS ran out of batteries part way through, “but before its demise it measured more then the documented distance,” he said. He wasn’t complaining though: “Another 10 kilometres is really just an hour of awesome scenery and fantastic trail. It was a bonus, not a burden!”
Some may not agree. After all, how hard is it to run two rugged marathons, back to back? Maybe the clearest picture is drawn from the next day. As Suter said: “I crawled from my bed to the couch today. I can only crawl around the house on all fours at the moment – super, super pain in my legs!” Still, ultra-marathon the day before or not, you can’t keep a good man down – especially one with a training record to maintain. “I'm not sure how I'm going to manage to get out for a run today,” Suter admitted. “But I’ve got to keep my streak alive - day 558 and counting!”
Results: www.taraweraultra.co.nz
