KERRE MCIVOR
KERRE HAS TWO REASONS TO BE IN QUEENSTOWN – TO KICK UP HER HEELS FOR A 50TH AND TAKE ON A HALF MARATHON
It was a glorious day. The sky was blue and there wasn’t a cloud to be seen. The morning was calm and clear, slightly cool, but with the promise of sun later in the day. Perfect running weather and ideal for the Queenstown Marathon participants.
I had travelled to Queenstown with the team from Get Running. It was a big group, in part because a weekend in Queenstown is always an attractive proposition, but mostly because we were celebrating Niva Retimanu’s
50th birthday.
Niva is my friend, as well as a colleague at Newstalk ZB. She’s an award-winning newsreader with a voice like an espresso martini – rich and deep, and with a touch of naughtiness. She’s a hugely popular member of the newsroom and she’s also enormously popular among the runners at Get Running. She’s one of the slower runners – Mike Hosking ribs her mercilessly about the time she spends out on the streets completing marathons around the world and Niva’s autobiography was titled Leading from Behind: Winning While Coming Last.
But whether she’s at the tail-end of the runners or right up the front when it comes to leading the fun, she’s an integral member of the running group. Everybody wanted the opportunity to celebrate Niva’s milestone birthday, so off to Queenstown we went.
The plan was to arrive Friday night and settle in, participate in the 10km, the half marathon or the full marathon on Saturday morning, then head off to Arrowtown on Saturday night, where we’d booked out a restaurant and hired a DJ.
I had intended to run the full marathon when I’d signed up earlier in the year but a few weeks ago, I realised that 42km was going to be beyond me.
I’ve run six marathons and I have far too much respect for them to go into them underdone.
The arrival of baby Bart put paid to any serious training and while I managed to run the Auckland half marathon without doing much running, I knew that a marathon was one step – in fact, thousands of steps – too far.
Having crossed the finish line in Auckland, I knew I could manage Queenstown. I’d be slow, but all the better to appreciate the beauty of the course. However, on the morning of the run, I pulled out.
I’d had a head cold for a few days and while I could have run with that, I had also spent the night with an unsettled stomach and I wasn’t going to risk running 21km with a dodgy tummy.
You can’t count on a portable toilet being right there when you need it and the thought of disgracing myself on the course filled me with horror. I would become an urban legend in the worst possible way. So I pulled out. Something I’ve never done before. Nobody likes a quitter.
If I set myself a challenge,
I like to achieve it. But it was the right decision. I stayed in my hotel room and soaked up the sun on the balcony while 10,000 runners took to the streets and the trails of Queenstown.
I had terrible FOMO later in the day when I saw all the runners with medals round their necks, and I’ve vowed to return next year and get a medal of my own. Luckily, I came right in time for Niva’s party. We dined well and toasted Niva, then took to the dance floor and boogied away ‘til the early hours of the morning. In fact, I danced for so long that the next morning, my legs were as sore as if I had actually run the marathon.
There will always be another race to run, but Niva will only turn 50 once, so all in all, I think I can say that I participated in the most important event of the weekend. There should have been a medal for that!
‘Everybody wanted the opportunity to celebrate Niva’s milestone birthday, so off to Queenstown we went’