A few weeks ago Matt, AKA “The mouth of the south” wrote an excellent article on the 2013 Tarawera Ultra and the potential the 100km field has this year. Without a doubt both the men’s and women’s start lists and the names mentioned by Matt in that story are impressive. But hardly a day after that story was published I had to write poor Matt and tell him he might need to do a re-write, with whispers of arguably the biggest collective force in ultra trail running making plans to visit New Zealand shores in March. Throw a few more Australians in the women’s field and (other than course record holder Sam Wreford) the fastest marathoner with legit ultra experience to line up at Tarawera.
All this prompted me to make the call that the 2013 Vibram Tarawera Ultra will have a start list as good as any other 100km trail ultra in the world in 2013! Not bad for little old New Zealand in March. (UROC in Colorado, which is also the SkyRunning Ultra series final will no doubt have a great start list also- but I think TUM will be as good).
So who is in that wasn’t 2-3 weeks ago?
2012 UTMB winner François D’haene
The Tarawera Ultra website now has a dedicated page for the “elites”, so we will not go into great details here, but highlights would be that Team Salomon Running is coming out to New Zealand in March, at this stage this includes Emelie Forsberg, Anna Frost, Candice Burt, François D’haene, Rickey Gates and Greg Vollet. Who in the team is running which race/race distance is still to be confirmed, so don’t necessarily expect to see the Salomon Express running the full 100.
One runner you can expect to see cranking the full 100 (and in my opinion, in course record pace) is Sage Canaday. Like I said the Tarawera website has a great resource now, so check out Sage’s bio there- but most relevant to NZ ultra fans- he beat Vajin by around 30min’s in the White River 50miler, on route to breaking Anton Krupicka’s course record.
While New Zealand ultra trail women are well represented on the TuM elite page (Sarah, Dawn, Anna and Ruby), Vajin Armstrong is a lone NZ flag- but the call has been made- stay tuned, there might be a name or 2 to add to that list yet…..
2013 Vibram Tarawera Ultra- Runners to Watch List
Andrew
January 1, 2013
Where’s that elite Salomon athlete Grant Guise?
BCR
January 1, 2013
good question Andrew….
Matt
January 2, 2013
Yeah That was mean and even then you still didn’t tell me who was lining up. Bully.
But we all know the big race is the following weekend between de Monchy, Beaumont, Lukes, Bixley and Sutton