From coast to coast —this way madness lies

Press, 11 February 1986, Page 21

From coast to coast —this way madness lies

By

MARGARET BAKER

The first sign of madness is getting off the bus at Merivale instead of Papanui, and walking three blocks down the wrong street before realising you are not getting any closer to home. And all because you worked late, missed your macaroni for tea and were sitting in the bus in a daze of Coast-to-Coast thoughts instead of looking where you were going. The two day endurance event has a way of sneaking into all parts of your life long before you actually have to live it. I probably became quite a boring person for at least a month before.

Somehow you get caught in a spin of emotions, of mental and physical exertion, of excitement (mixed with a little fear) beating away at the back of your mind.

And now that’s its over, I can still hardly say how it feels to have done it or why I did it. When it happens, it is all so fast, so slow — it is all things at once — you are there and you’re doing it. That’s all that matters.

The reasons are endless. For me it was for fun, the challenge and the achievement — for the whole experience, the adventure, for setting a personal goal and getting there.

I know I felt excitement and exhaustion, anticipation and a dull acceptance. There was the great sense of achievement and success at the end of the run — pure elation as I reached the group of friends and family waiting on the line. I was nervous and worried but I looked forward to it. During the event I felt a great sense of camaraderie, friendship and pride for my teammate, and for my support crew. This was the crew who stayed up to 1 a.m. on Saturday fixing my bike after it was rather badly bent in an incident on the Otira road. They huddled around a light in the middle of Kumara racecourse, while my teammate Tracey, and I, tried to sleep off some of our nerves.

We had no qualms about sleeping while they worked, or the fact that they got up earlier than us and fed us breakfast, packed the tents and organised our gear.

That was just how it was. You tend to become a little selfish about it all, but you don’t really think about it too much.

All we had to do was compete. Our crew were great, but then, they didn’t have to be force-fed mounds of white toast and jam at 5 a.m., or platefuls of macaroni for tea. And just one more banana. But they did say that they thought of me on the run while they lazed in the Saturday afternoon sunshine.

Our crew was probably a little larger than most, but I feel that including a bike mechanic and physiotherapist in the group is totally essential. Then you need a van for gear transport, at least four people to cheer loudly at the end of the sections, and it is very satisfying to have an Australian friend to impress with it all.

The crew’s job must be quite unsettling. They wait for hours to perform a frantic two-minute change-over, then more hours to perform another. All go, and then nothing. I realised how indespensible the support crew were when I was knocked off my bike in Moorhouse Avenue. Suddenly I was surrounded by five people, put back on the seat, feet fixed into the pedals and sent on my way, all without a word from me except “the chain” when the pedals slipped round. On the last section nothing seemed to matter at all except the bike wheel in front of me. Your mind turns off from everything else and you just become an automaton, getting closer and closer to the end. The end features rather largely. Running down the Mingha riverbed in the direct heat of the sun, I remember watching my feet place themselves one after another in front of me, as if they belonged to someone else. But I knew they would get me to the finish.

After the end, the whole event becomes a mass of images and experiences — from all the people eating all the food in the Kumara hall on Friday night, to the sense of inevitability as you drive away from your teammate

at the start of the day; watching the cyclists speed in like a whirl of locusts, swaying and dispersing; thinking there is nothing you feel less like than the lager you were handed at the end of the run; the image of headlights burning into the still-dark • Arthurs Pass morning, twisting their way up and around the hills. Robin Judkins was somewhere and everywhere all the time, screaming out his unique brand of laughter and abuse, as if he were loving it, hating it, in the middle of a nightmare and having the time of his life all at once.

He was there at the end of each day to greet every person, though I accidentally ran straight past him. His sharp one-liners lightened his serious safety talk, and fitted the mood to the prizegiving perfectly.

He adds the final seal to whatever it is that makes this event so different, and has convinced hundreds of people all over the world of its special quality. Though it has become something of a cliche, the event is special. It crosses a country, and involves all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds. This year there seemed to be a more professional and competitive feeling about it; the times were faster and the people very well prepared. Much of this could be due to the time people had had to train, but some of it

was undoubtedly the influence of a growing triathlete population in New Zealand. As one of my friends said, fewer of the men had beards.

But everyone was swept along in the wave of excitement it creates. It somehow puts the most superior athlete under its thumb. Probably once you start you realise that just to do it is enough. Not that I even remember it being incredibly hard — there were times of exhaustion, but the memory has that wonderful knack of blotting them out

As far as the pain goes, you really have no choice anyway once you are in there, so you might as well just get on with it. There were, of course, some things about it that provided pure enjoyment. All the smugly justified eating of chips and cream buns, the gleeful throwing of yet another packet of chocolate biscuits into the supermarket trolley. When it was all over, it took five hours between waking up on Monday and actually getting up, and at work my head felt like the insides of a peanut butter jar. But emerging now from the incredible high of finishing and all the psyching in and out that goes with the event, I feel on an even keel of quiet happiness. I achieved what I wanted, and that was to do it — whatever the reason.