The record ultra run that wasn’t
It was a feat for the ages, breaking a 43-year-old record. Except it quickly became clear it didn’t add up, Dana Johannsen writes
In November Kiwi ultramarathon runner Perry Newburn, 64, set off from Cape Reinga aiming to break a four-decades-old record for running the length of the country. The endeavour in aid of charity attracted widespread media coverage, the story of the former heroin addict who turned to running to help rehabilitate himself proving a compelling tale. More than 1000 supporters followed his progress on his Facebook page. He arrived in Bluff 18 days, 8 hours and 42 minutes later, apparently eclipsing the mark set in 1975 by one of the sport’s pioneers, Siggy Bauer, by just 19 minutes.
For eight days Newburn, who did not wear a GPS device during the run, claimed the record, appearing in radio and television interviews. But in late November he unexpectedly relinquished his claim, telling followers on Facebook he was driven some of the way due to unsafe conditions.
‘‘There were parts of the run where road/bridge conditions were totally unsafe to run and therefore I made the call to be driven through these parts – these decisions were my decisions.’’
The post gave the impression his record attempt had essentially failed on a technicality, but a member of Newburn’s support crew has since painted a different picture.
Graeme Calder, who joined the event in Wellington and was sole support crew for the South Island, called the record attempt a ‘‘sham’’.
‘‘The reality is, he insisted on being driven large distances so that he could be at his required destination each day.’’
Calder started recording a detailed log of the distances Newburn was driven on the third day of his stint. Entries show he was driven more than 250km, but Calder estimates it was closer to 350km, including the stretches he did not log on the first two days.
Calder, who in many ways remains protective of Newburn, stresses he was still running incredible distances each day, to the point of extreme exhaustion. But it was well short of the 110-120km he was claiming to run.
Asked if he accepts Calder’s numbers, Newburn told Stuff: ‘‘The one thing I tried to state at the beginning, it doesn’t matter if it was 1 kilometre or 500 kilometres. On any record attempt – and it should never have been that to be quite honest, I got caught up in the hype and I’m not happy with myself about that – you have to complete the distance.
‘‘If I could step back and change things I certainly would. I mean, it has eaten me up.’’
PROBLEMS FROM THE OFF
Alarm bells rang for Calder early on. He was asked to step in at 48 hours’ notice by Kashif Shuja, the New Zealand representative for sponsor Salming and one of the key organisers, after the entire support crew for the South Island apparently fell over.
He met Newburn in Waikanae, on the Ka¯ piti Coast, and discussed logistics before driving ahead to Wellington to get the support vehicle on the Interislander. Expecting it would be touch and go for Newburn to make the ferry departure, Calder was shocked to learn he was being driven the final 10km. Missing the ferry would have set his record attempt back 12 hours.
Newburn told Calder he would add an extra 10km loop in the South Island. It was never added in.
‘‘[Newburn] didn’t seem to think it was a major issue. But it didn’t really add up to me because there was still the issue of the timing and if he missed the ferry that added considerable time. That to me was all part of the logistics of completing the run within the record,’’ Calder says.
There were further problems that night. The original plan was for Newburn to run the 30 kilometres from Picton to Blenheim. However, Calder says a severely sleep-deprived Newburn was in ‘‘bad shape’’ when the ferry docked and did not make it far before he packed it in and asked to be driven to the accommodation.
Calder noted where Newburn had stopped and expected to start there in the morning. However, the next day, Newburn instructed Calder to drop him on the outskirts of Blenheim – knocking 30km off the journey. ‘‘That was when I really started to become concerned about what was happening.’’
The 128km leg from Blenheim to Kaiko¯ ura proved one of the most farcical, with Calder estimating Newburn was driven further than he ran. Struggling on just two hours sleep, he needed regular sleep stops early in the day. Having lost a lot of time, he then asked to be driven to the coast. Calder went ahead to organise accommodation. When he returned, Newburn asked to be driven the remainder of the way to Kaiko¯ ura. The next morning, he insisted on restarting from Kaiko¯ ura, Calder says.
At this point Calder began keeping his log and refused to sign Newburn’s own logbook.
Calder says while he was horrified he did not feel he could abandon Newburn.
‘‘People keep asking me why didn’t I just pull out, or expose it at that point. I guess there’s several reasons for that – some of my decisionmaking I regret.’’
‘‘You can’t deny what he was running each day were still incredible numbers . . . He was raising a lot of money for charity and also raising an incredible amount of awareness for that charity, which is very dear to my heart.
‘‘Also my role was to support him. Whether I agreed with what he was doing or not, you can’t do those sort of distances each day on your own, you still need support. I had agreed to support him for the South Island and still felt an obligation to continue to help him.
He admits not having any direct conversations with Newburn about the ramifications of what he was doing as he found the veteran runner difficult and evasive. But Calder says he was led to believe through various comments that
Newburn would not try to break the record. ‘‘I felt so long as he didn’t claim the record, I could live with it.’’
BLUFFING IN BLUFF
The final leg into Bluff was essentially two days rolled into one, as Newburn ran through the night to meet his target.
This, for many observers, is the hardest part to reconcile. Any legitimate claim on the record disappeared long before Newburn hit the South Island. So why did he try so hard over the final 48 hours to ‘break’ it?
Newburn struggles for an answer. ‘‘With the benefit of hindsight, I probably should have pulled the plug early in the piece,’’ he says.
Things got chaotic as they neared the finish.
‘‘Coming into Invercargill in the early hours of that final morning and it was just all on. People were trying to get hold of me as to where he was, where they could join him, reporters and radio stations were trying to make contact, the sponsor, who was driving down from Christchurch because his flight had been cancelled was trying to get in touch to meet up with us,’’ says Calder.
Calder had originally arranged to meet Shuja in Invercargill the night before and fill him in on what had been going on. But travel delays meant Shuja did not arrive until early in the morning. When he did, he took one look at an exhausted Calder and ordered him to have a break.
While Calder refuelled, he resolved to stay well in the background in the final kilometres to the Bluff lookout.
‘‘When I got back the sponsor wanted me to put on a sponsor’s T-shirt and run with Perry in to the finish. I ended up doing it and I remember kind of asking myself, ‘Why am I here? I didn’t want to do this.’ I guess I got caught up in everything that was happening. I was sleep-deprived, I was put on the spot. I can’t fully explain it, but that’s what happened.’’
At the finish, an emotional Newburn is pictured slumped over the railing at the Bluff lookout. In a video interview later posted to his Facebook page, he talks at length about his achievement.
‘‘You dream about something, you make it a goal, then it becomes a reality and the reality of 18 days, sub 9 hours is something I have dreamed about for a wee while. It is only starting to sink in now. It is a huge achievement,’’ he says.
In another video, he acknowledges a message of congratulations from Bauer, passed on by another member of the ultramarathon community, Don Jacobs. Little did he know Jacobs was doing the sums and realising something was amiss.
THE HONOUR CODE
Newburn’s record attempt was followed closely by the ultramarathon community, but Jacobs was perhaps more meticulous than most. From inconsistent online updates, he tracked Newburn’s progress and made detailed notes as he went.
His diary entries express a mixture of confusion and incredulity. ‘‘The sport is very measurable and very mathematical,’’ says Jacobs. ‘‘And Perry’s numbers didn’t make sense.’’
It is not entirely unusual for record attempts to be done without GPS tracking. Jacobs says traditionally fastest known time (FKT) attempts have relied on a strict honour code.
‘‘Back in the very early days it was post office to post office, and you would get the postmaster to sign that you’d arrived. Then when vehicles came along, it was [odometers], and that’s how Siggy Bauer measured his distances . . . He also got people to sign his book,’’ says Jacobs, a keen historian of the sport. ‘‘But at the end of the day, . . . if you don’t maintain the honour code, then the whole thing falls apart.’’
Jacobs suspects somewhere amid all the pain, exhaustion, and sleep deprivation, Newburn misplaced this code. He believes the problem was further compounded by poor organisation and an inexperienced support crew.
‘‘Nobody understands, unless you’ve done it, the sort of strain they’re under. The judge, jury, and the executioner have to be the handlers. They have to make the decisions in relation to the logistics . . . which means that they must be your conscience.’’
THE FALLOUT
Newburn says he tried to put things ‘‘semi-right’’ when he got home by announcing he would not claim the record, but his Facebook admission appears to have followed pressure to come clean.
Deeply uncomfortable with what had transpired, Calder consulted peers in the ultramarathon community. They came up with an action plan – starting with meeting Shuja, who says it was the first time he learned of any major issues.
‘‘My first question was why Graeme had taken so long to come out. He had plenty of time to share things with me – we travelled back together and he stayed at my house at the end of it all. I thought this was atrocious.’’
Shuja says he called Newburn, who admitted he was driven and ‘‘quickly and very calmly told me he was not going to claim the record’’.
Calder also met Newburn in Napier, armed with a press release he’d drafted with the help of a media professional.
‘‘[Perry] agreed that yes, he needed to come clean on what had happened, make a full apology and for that press release to go out to all the media that had covered it,’’ says Calder. ‘‘The sponsor and Perry then informed us that the press release needed a bit of finetuning and they would come back to us with the final draft.’’
Instead, Newburn put a very different statement on his Facebook page, giving himself an honourable out.
Newburn has defended the eight-day lag time in publicly rescinding his claim on the record. ‘‘I had only been home for two or three days when I put that statement out,’’ he says. ‘‘I had to go through a couple of processes and talk to a few people . . . again in hindsight I wish I had done that earlier.’’
The post, which did not specify the distances travelled by vehicle, was met with overwhelming support, with many praising his honesty and noting the phenomenal effort he had put in regardless.
‘But debate was raging on endurance sport message boards. Some, like Jacobs, already had their suspicions, while Newburn’s supporters staunchly defended his integrity.
Calder says seeing the ‘‘false impression’’ many followers had gleaned from Newburn’s post prompted him to step forward and release a statement of his own on an adventure racing community page on Facebook.
His revelations have led some to question the legitimacy of Newburn’s other high-profile feat. In 2014, he ran across the US in a masters record time of 51 days, beating the mark previously held by prominent ultra runner and adventure racer Marshall Ulrich. Stuff has been unable to contact the organiser of that event.
Jacobs says that, until evidence shows otherwise, he is prepared to take the trans-America record at face value. ‘‘I would like to think that he has done [the US record] right, and this length of New Zealand is an aberration. I don’t think it is at the core of who he is. I just think, for whatever reason, he lost the plot with this one.’’
Newburn says he has tried his best to ignore the online chatter, the accusations and the memes. ‘‘It is difficult, no-one likes to be sledged, but there’s certain things I just have to take on the chin. I can’t change what’s happened,’’ he says. ‘‘I just hope at some point I can move on.’’
Postscript: In April, Grant ‘‘Curly’’ Jacobs (Don Jacobs’ cousin) will have a crack at Bauer’s 44-year-old record, running from Bluff to Cape Reinga. He plans to wear two GPS devices.