Race Report: New Zealand’s Crazy Croesus Crossing
Monday, January 18th, 2010
I was all smiles before the start of the Croesus Crossing because I was clueless about the terrain we faced.
Two days have passed since Morgan and I finished the Croesus Crossing trail event on the West Coast of New Zealand, and we’re still looking at each other stupefied and using expressions like, “Can you believe …?” and “What was that?” I’m grateful that he was with me to corroborate the technical difficulty of the course and the abnormal adroitness of the other runners. We feel a bit like anthropologists who spied a new breed of trail runner here in the jungle-like bush of the South Island.
Long story short: We got our butts kicked. We were unprepared for the difficulty and humbled by the hard-core agility of the others.
“Did you enjoy it?” someone asked me. No, I can’t say I did. But it was a learning experience.
(Hitting your head with a hammer also could be called a learning experience: Don’t do it again.)
Recently, here and on our Away Together travel blog, I’ve been raving about New Zealand trail running. There are beautiful, well-maintained trails (called “tracks”) crisscrossing the country’s national parks. We thought the Croesus Crossing would be like the other tracks we’ve run here, with mostly level footing and well marked. We were wrong. (more…)