Women’s winning streak
Five years ago two Wellington women and another from Porirua scratched together a team for the Crazyman multisport race and they won the women’s team section of the Crazyman.
On May 6 kayaker Marianne Archer, from Porirua, and twins Sally and Helen Anderson of Wellington repeated the feat, making it five wins in succession.
Archer said the three didn’t know one another before they teamed up.
‘‘I was kayaking once with someone who worked with one of them and he said they were looking for a kayaker.’’
The three teamed up first for the Porirua Traverse then the Crazyman.
Archer won the New Zealand Marathon Kayak Championships in Porirua last month and she is in the national flat water kayaking team in the 200m and 500m classes, though has not been selected for the London Olympics.
Her next challenge will take her to Canada for the World Waka Ama championships and she is looking forward to the World Kayaking Championships next year.
Next May she plans to front up at the Crazyman start line again.
‘‘It’s a good event,’’ she said. ‘‘The event is always well run. I love it.’’
Maungaraki athlete James Coubrough was fastest individual man on Sunday in 3 hours 48 minutes and 52 seconds, 17 minutes ahead of Dan Moore of Picton.
Jill Westenra, of Petone, a previous women’s race winner, turned up after a lengthy absence and showed she still had what it took to win.
Westenra completed the 60km kayaking, running and mountainbiking course in 4h 48m 30s, seven minutes ahead of Helen Chittenden of Nelson.
Leading up to the event, race organisers Michael Jacques and John Cussins had some misgivings about a new course.
Although the mountainbike course had been either on public land or following paper roads along boundaries, new property owners were less cooperative than past ones.
‘‘We were actually worried about it because it needed so many marshalls on the course,’’ Jacques said.
However, the event went well and he had received lots of good feedback from competitors.
The new course was completely on public land which boded well for its longevity prospects.
‘‘We weren’t expecting the awesome weather. The Crazyman [weather] is traditionally okay to crap.’’
Wellington’s long autumn continued to deliver near perfect conditions for the first race on the new course, he said.