Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
A moment to be at one with nature
‘‘It was just magic. We said, ‘we’ve got to share this, we’ve got to create something’. So that was really when the Old Ghost Ultra was born.’’
With a gasp, and then silence, it’s a moment in time that is momentous, yet so hard to capture and explain.
Pulling myself up the last step of the climb I’ve just undertaken, I take a look at the landscape below, glimpses of trees, hills and a city, a view obscured and at the same time somehow enhanced by the cloak of fog squatting low and steam rising from beneath the Earth’s crust.
I’m on the Po¯ haturoa Track in Rotorua’s Redwood Forest, at Whakarewarewa, part of a run I did last week. I’m alone, although it’s a view many thousands have enjoyed before. But at this very moment, there’s a very personal connection: myself and nature. I can’t help but smile.
It’s one of the very best things I love about trail running, that exchange between me as runner, as a person, and the earth. And it’s so hard to explain.
At the chemical level, of course, there’s the exchange of air: me, gasping from the climb, and the surrounding trees delivering me sweetly-scented fresh oxygen, an elixir for my tired muscles and lungs. But it’s so much more than that. (And when I say sweetlyscented, yes, I know I’m in Rotorua, so the air also has the fragrance of sulphur but, hey, I used to live here – I love it).
On the Dirt Church Radio podcast, co-host Matt Rayment and I spoke with runner and race organiser Phil Rossiter, one of the people behind the remarkable Old Ghost Road on the West Coast.
And one of the things we talked about is that exchange that takes place between runner and nature. And, no, he couldn’t explain that moment, either.
‘‘There’s that biochemistry of the endorphin release but without a doubt there’s something else,’’ he said.
He spoke of the wave that comes, especially when you’ve been through uncertainty and the bleakness of wondering if you can make it somewhere. ‘‘There’s a release of some weird flood of feelgood and self-confidence. It’s definitely a natural drug.
‘‘It transcends so much. Fundamentally it makes us better people, it’s good for us, it’s good for the country, it’s good for humanity.’’
If it is some sort of drug, then Rossiter is an enabler, and a pusher. As well as helping build the Old Ghost Road, an 85km track from Lyell in the Upper Buller Gorge to the Mokihinui River, he is the driving force behind an ultramarathon race on the route.
The genesis of the race was on a day when they were still building the track.
Rossiter and colleague and friend, Jim McIlraith, set out to run the track in a day.
They started before dawn, soon bumping into kiwi ‘‘stumbling around on the track in front of us’’, and arrived at a peak just in time for a spectacular sunrise.
About 10.30, they sat on a ledge, overlooking a valley in the middle of nowhere. ‘‘It was just magic.
‘‘We said, ‘we’ve got to share this, we’ve got to create something’. So that was really when the Old Ghost Ultra was born.’’
The race they created to share the track with runners soon became a major fixture on the New Zealand trail running scene. It’s so popular that next year’s event sold out in 23 minutes.
There are other races, too, that capture that spirit, events which make the wilderness accessible. The Kepler Challenge, out of Te A¯ nau every December springs to mind, a race where you trek over Mt Luxmore, stare down at the serenity of the lake far below, and laugh with the cheeky kea on the tops. But it doesn’t have to be a race. Sometimes you’ll find it alone on a trail, like that moment on the Po¯ haturoa Track.
Just you, nature, and that sweet, sweet (sulphur-infused) air.
Eugene Bingham and Matt Rayment are hosts of the trail running podcast Dirt Church Radio. Learn more at dirtchurchradio.com or get in touch via email dirtchurchradio@gmail. com