Pakawau man hooked on Kepler mountain run
Recently home after completing his fifth Kepler Challenge, Pakawau resident and Collingwood postie Graham Williams describes the 60km mountain run through Fiordland National Park as totally exhausting but a thoroughly satisfying event to participate in.
Often described as the jewel in New Zealand’s mountain running calendar, the run is traditionally held on the first Saturday in December, with a 6am starting line. Participants ridge-climb to altitudes over 1500m, but Graham says it’s not all running.
“There are many rocky and rugged places you just have to walk. That gives you a bit of a psychological break. There’s eight checkpoints in the huts along the way, where they have bananas, oranges and muesli bars if you need them. You fill your water bottle and head off again.”
The event is organised by a voluntary committee with the support, on race day, of approximately 200 Te Anau residents, which gives the event a truly community feel.
The Kepler Challenge has been held for the last 22 years and is limited to 400 competitors in the Challenge and 150 in its associated sister race, the 27km Luxmore Grunt. Just getting your name onto the race list is a competitive sport. When entries open online, on the first Saturday in July, the 400 places are snapped up within half an hour, attracting a wide range of competitors in both nationality and age groups.
“Our internet is too slow so I got someone in Auckland to enter me, otherwise I would have missed out. Once you know you’re in, you can start training,” says Graham, who works up with two-hour runs four or five times a week, plus a longer one on weekends. This year it took the 55-year-old 8hrs 35min to complete the run, a reasonably good time. The oldest competitor this year was 73.
As the race name suggests, the majority of people who compete do so as a personal challenge. One such competitor this year was Aucklander Malcolm Law, who turned up in Te Anau on the eve of the race having run 300km over the previous six days, the first person ever to run the seven mainland Great Walks in seven consecutive days. His aim was to raise at least $50,000 for the Leukaemia and Blood Foundation after his brother recently died of leukaemia.
Comments Graham: “There’s lots of reasons why people enter the Kepler Challenge, but for me it’s just about knowing I could do it, and then once I’d done it, I guess I got hooked.”
Gerard Hindmarsh
