NZ’s toughest adventure race
The Revenant ultra adventure race warns entrants, ‘Failure is the most likely outcome’. But for Ian Evans, not finishing the race this year, wasn’t an option. Mike White was at last weekend’s feat of endurance and watched a truly epic athletic achievement
The wind came from nowhere. Ian Evans barely noticed it at first, as he huddled inside the tent at race headquarters, just before 11pm on Saturday.
By then, he’d been running for 42 hours and 150km, surviving temperatures that hit 30 degrees, and vicious terrain that had long ago destroyed all other competitors.
Now, he had just 50km to go, and 18 hours to get there, to beat The Revenant, New Zealand’s hardest adventure race.
Sitting in a chair, he quickly cooked a hot meal, examined the damage to his feet, replenished his backpack with 2kg of food, and double-checked his headlamp.
Then he pushed himself up on to tender feet, hugged his fiance´ e, Jane Zwerrenz, and patted their dog, Poppy. Shouldering his backpack,
Evans headed outside for the final leg.
Only now did he notice the wind, how the tent was shaking, how it had quickly robbed the evening of its last warmth.
A sickle moon had just dropped behind mountains to the west as Evans turned into the wind, and plunged down through tussock towards the first of 14 checkpoints he needed to find.
Zwerrenz and other supporters watched his headlamp zigzag downhill for a few minutes, then disappear, as if blown out by the gale that seemed to strengthen even as they stood there.
Two days earlier, Scott Worthington had welcomed 24 competitors to a woolshed near Garston, just south of Lake Wakatipu.
They wore T-shirts with screenprinted slogans extolling effort: ‘‘Be More Savage’’, ‘‘Be Hard When It Gets Hard’’, ‘‘No Pain, No Gain’’. Easy bravado on wicking fabric.
It was Worthington, a retired businessman, and adventure racer, who came up with the idea of The Revenant, based on America’s famous Barkley Marathons in Tennessee’s woods, a race so tough only 15 people have finished it, in 35 years.
He designed a 200km course over Tom and Katie O’Brien’s Blackmore Station, which rises from the Mataura Valley, crosses the Welcome Rock trail Tom cut by hand for walkers and cyclists, and descends to the Nokomai Valley near the edge of Central Otago.
Runners had to be completely unsupported – no GPS, no phones, no watches, just a map and compass. They had to complete four 50km laps, and on each one, navigate to 14 wellhidden checkpoints.
To finish, they’d need to ascend 16,000m – the equivalent of Mt Everest’s base camp to its summit five times.
All those who quit had to tap the special bottle of Revenant whisky when they arrived back at base. Anyone who finished in less than 60 hours got to drink a shot from the bottle and be known as a revenant – one who’s returned from a long absence, as if from the dead. Worthington reckoned the bottle would stay uncorked for a while.
He was right.
In 2019, when The Revenant debuted, nobody got close. Only one person managed to get halfway. The hills, the heat, the brutal river valleys, simply smashed a high-class field of local and international runners, ironmen, SAS soldiers and US Navy Seals.
But last year, the miraculous happened – three runners made it around The Revenant’s four laps within the time limit. Louis Schindler, Angus Watson and bearded Auckland running guru Shaun Collins proved it wasn’t ‘‘the impossible race’’, as it had been dubbed.
Ian Evans, a lawn mowing contractor from Wa¯ naka, watched each of them cross the finish line, thrilled for their success.
But deep down, he was so badly torn up, tears were never far away.
In the first year, Evans had been leading the race and feeling good. Midway through his second lap, bounding down a slope in the dark, he tripped and tumbled.
When he paused for a break later, he realised he’d lost his map and other vital documents in the fall.
He backtracked for two hours, searching the tussock, but never found them. Forced to pull out, he was left wondering just how far he could have got.
Last year, Evans had just one checkpoint to collect to finish his third lap. But in the dark, he took the wrong spur, descended too far, frantically retraced his climb, but still couldn’t find the small clip-top box containing the page he needed to collect. Out of time, he made his way back to the race base, distraught at how close he’d come, devastated the course and night had colluded to cheat him again.
Nothing anyone could say helped soothe the hurt he felt right then. The truth was, he knew only one thing could do that – coming back next year and trying all over again.
Fat drops of rain hitting his face woke Evans around 5am Sunday. He’d struggled since starting his final lap six hours earlier, ‘‘sleep demons’’ assailing him, his mind wandering in the dark, his body following suit, ‘‘staggering like a drunk coming home from the pub,’’ he later said.
The wind had roared, catching him for 8km along the tops, flattening the race headquarters tent he’d sheltered in hours before, rocking the ute where Zwerrenz and Poppy lay, trying to sleep.
By 4am, he’d reached just the fourth checkpoint of the lap, deep in the Nokomai Valley. Realising he had to sleep, Evans, 32, donned all his warm clothes, wrapped his legs in his jacket, and lay down beside the river, in the scant shelter he could find.
But after 45 minutes, the rain came, raising Evans from a shallow sleep, just as the first hints of dawn spread across the sky.
Back on legs that had now stiffened and seized, he splashed his way upriver for an hour, then started a long climb out of the valley to a checkpoint on a spectacular bluff. Then he began climbing again, through scrub and shale and forest, to a faraway ridge.
The Revenant is relentless though, with little care for contours, and no room for respite. Once Evans reached the ridgeline, he had to drop back 700m to the Mataura Valley.
Without a watch, most of the time Evans could only look to the sun and estimate how long he had until the 60-hour race cut-off at 5.12pm.
But checkpoint nine was one of a few where Worthington had left a watch, and when Evans
checked it, he found it was 9.20am, leaving him just under eight hours to get home. He was on track, he figured. As long as he could keep moving.
Evans slung his backpack on once more, and headed back up the hill, back to the same bare ridgeline he’d come from, which the sun now hovered above, burning his face as he glanced up to check the way.
By then, Evans had been running on his own for about 36 hours. Competitors had begun dropping out during the first afternoon. Most had made it around one lap before accepting they couldn’t go on, the heat wearing them down, the ruthless climbs and descents finishing them off.
Dave Viitakangas had dislocated his kneecap after slipping in the Nokomai River. ‘‘But I just gave it a bang with my hand and it went back in. Took about three gos. As soon as it goes back in, it’s good. It’s just when it’s out, it’s, like, f ...... unbearable.’’
The 50-year-old Queenstown builder and keen hunter had sat in the river for 15 minutes to dull the pain, then set off again. ‘‘And I’ve got some codeine,’’ he said cheerily as he headed towards the next checkpoint.
Adam Keen had been beaten by a notorious checkpoint buried deep in the forest. After three hours searching unsuccessfully in the dark, he accepted defeat, realising he couldn’t make the cut-off for lap two.
Andre Chalmers got a few hours’ sleep in an old goldmining water pipe before making his way back to base. ‘‘Oh man, it’s a crazy course out there – it’s not a simple trail.’’
Matt Hamblett began hallucinating, seeing writing on the hillsides. But he realised it was just visions born from no sleep, because the spelling was wrong.
One of the race favourites, Michael Stuart, completed the
first lap with Evans, and refuelled with a Coke, a supermarket fruit mince pie, a cold can of Aunt Betty’s chocolate creamy rice, and a five-minute nap.
But three checkpoints into his second lap, an old injury flared, and Stuart quit.
A few competitors finished two laps. Last year, Chris Taylor had pulled out after one loop, and then, ‘‘ran away. I just felt like I didn’t belong up there.’’
It took a week for the former Michelin-star restaurant chef, now Dunedin real estate agent, to face failure and decide to have another go.
This year, he went further than anyone other than Evans, getting part-way around his third lap before retiring.
But perhaps the cruellest story belonged to Wellington air traffic controller Jean Beaumont and Wa¯ naka doctor Katie Wright, who looked on course to
start the second half of the race before making a tragic navigation error.
Heading to the final checkpoint on lap two, they missed the ridge they needed to turn down, overshot by miles, and ended up in an unforgiving gully of matagouri and Spaniard grass that stabbed through their shoes and skin.
The mistake soaked up so much time it put them just outside the cut-off limit of 30 hours, and ended their race.
‘‘We just forgot to navigate,’’ lamented Beaumont at the finish, eyes filling with tears. ‘‘It’s sleep deprivation. It is what it is, but I’m gutted.’’
‘‘Over-caffeinated, underslept,’’ summed up Wright.
And that’s the thing with The Revenant – success swings on tiny things. Competitors teeter between sleep and delusion; between carrying enough water,
and dehydration; between a perfect compass bearing, and misreading a map; between lugging sufficient food, and running on empty; between footfall on solid ground, and slipping on wet rocks.
Get everything right, and you might stand a chance. Miscalculate or miss something crucial, and a year’s training will be for nothing.
Approaching the final checkpoint, Evans paused and looked across several ridges to the finish line – almost close enough to sniff the whisky that waited for him. And when he climbed out of the last gully and saw the crowd waiting for him, he threw back his head, raised his walking poles, and roared to the sky.
A few minutes later he strode into the arms of Zwerrenz and the congratulations of his fellow competitors, nearly all of whom had stayed or returned to see him finish.
Just under 59 hours after he started, with an hour to spare, Evans jogged the final 20m to the finish, the disappointments of the previous two Revenants washed away with the shot of
whisky only an extraordinary few will ever taste.
‘‘Part of me is just relieved,’’ admitted Evans shortly afterwards, his face a mix of smeared sunscreen and giant smiles. ‘‘Because I was 100 per cent confident I had it in me to finish – it was just a matter of when. But I’m so, so happy, because it wasn’t an easy few days. The heat was intense, and I had to do quite a bit alone. And the bottom of my feet feel like razor blades. But it was amazing.’’
This place was special to Evans and Zwerrenz, who got engaged here just after Christmas, at a hut just along the Welcome Rock trail. The night had been freezing and sleety, but when they woke, they were above the clouds as the sun rose.
Wrapped in blankets, they went out to watch it, and Evans’ gloves dropped from his pocket. He knelt down to pick them up, produced a ring from inside one of them, and proposed to Zwerrenz. Their first child is due in a few weeks.
‘‘Next month an even bigger ultra adventure, which I’m even more excited about,’’ said Evans as he walked gingerly to his car. ‘‘I can’t wait, I just can’t wait.’’
‘We just forgot to navigate. It’s sleep deprivation. It is what it is, but I’m gutted.’ Jean Beaumont fights back tears after making a navigation error and missing the 30-hour cut-off to complete lap two.