Wellington runner and regular at the New Zealand Mountain Running Champs, Stephen Day lined up at the Jumbo-Holdsworth this past weekend and gives us his race report below. “The event in 2014 is the 20th year that runners have been lucky enough to compete over the challenging peaks of Mt Jumbo and Mt Holdsworth.”
This year was the twentieth anniversary of the Jumbo Holdsworth Mountain Race. I headed along to it, my first true trail race, thinking it would be good preparation for the national mountain running championships and a marker of where my fitness was at. Sadly the climbs in the race, especially up to Jumbo Hut, were so steep that they were not really runnable. So I ended up with an indication of my scrambling ability rather than a gauge on my hill-running fitness.
The Jumbo Holdsworth race allows competitors to run either direction around the loop. By the time we reached the turn off, about 2 kilometres into the race, we had settled down to a lead pack of three; the Japanese mounting running representative Yujiro Iida who had come over especially for the race and I headed anti-clockwise around to Jumbo Hut first, while Dan Clendon splintered off to head in the opposite direction. The regulars seemed to agree that the anti-clockwise route is slightly faster than the clockwise route.
Iida and I ran together to the bottom of the climb to Jumbo, then grovelled together to the top. I broke away from him going along the tussocky ridge tops.
I guesstimated Dan was likely to take about 20 minutes less to get down the mountain than I took to get up it so I figured if he was going to run about 2:30 I would need to not see him until at least the 1:25 mark. Which was pretty much exactly the time we crossed paths. We passed each other, wished each other luck, and groaned as we faced the next uphill slog.
Sadly I had miscalculated the number of climbs I had left before the downhill began, so by the time I got to Powell Hut I figured Dan had probably got ahead of me.
I still had a small lead on Yujiro but he ate that lead up on the steep downhill and pushed ahead about 100 metres in front of me. I took a deep breath and stretched out my stride, so that on the staired parts of the trail I shifted from taking two steps per stride to taking three – a big risk for a scardy cat like me.
Luckily once the downhill levelled out a bit I began to close the gap. Yujiro stumbled and I went past him with the clock at about 2:15. then I pinned my ears back and hoped my 2:30 guesstimate was right – otherwise I’d pop, having used up my sprint too early.
Luckily, I guessed pretty close to right. Ironically, after my fearful descent, it was at the 200 metres from the finish mark, on the gentle, flat, wide trails I rolled over my ankle and jogged gingerly to the finish, just under 2:32. A confused scan around and a breathless question to the race organiser confirmed Dan hadn’t quite made it back yet. But Yujiro was only a minute behind me and Dan another minute or two back from there.
I finished without any mountain running practice and a swollen ankle, but a rare victory and a fun day out on a beautiful Wairarapa summer day.
