Four hardy souls from Dunedin will put themselves through hell and beyond.
Endurance athletes Glenn Sutton, John Bayne, Andy Smith and Adam Keen will join 11 other New Zealanders in Auckland this weekend to contest the Backyard Ultra Satellite World Team Championship.
The what? Good question.
The backyard ultra is a last-person-standing running event in which runners do a 6.7km lap every hour until there is just one person still running.
The format has taken off around the world. There have been three backyard ultra events held in New Zealand, including the Pigs Backyard Ultra in Dunedin in February.
Teams from 37 countries will contest what is essentially a virtual event. The athletes will compete on courses in their own country.
The races will be held simultaneously and video-linked, which for the New Zealand teams means a horrific start time of 1am tomorrow.
Each team is made up of 15 runners. New Zealand is ranked quite low, but Steve Tripp, who is helping run the event, reckons they are a staunch bunch.
"If you look at the stats, we’re ranked in the lower half. But that is because of the events we’ve had, they’ve been quite tough," he said.
"This course should be a bit easier."
The course is in the Puhinui Reserve. The weather forecast for tomorrow has a picture of a sun poking out of a cloud, but Monday and Tuesday have clouds with blue drips — so not that promising.
The winning country will be the team which has completed the greatest number of laps overall, so while it will also be an individual contest to keep going the longest, the competitors need to support each other.
The world record for backyard ultra running is 90 laps (605km in 90 hours) set by Belgian Merijn Geerts.
Tripp reckons Sutton and Bayne have the steel to push beyond 50 hours, and fellow New Zealander Sam Harvey will carry some strong form into the event as well.
"It requires a lot of mental grit to run for two days plus. You’ve got to be physically fit obviously, but you also need a degree of mental fortitude which is just weird.
"To want to keep going when you are sleep deprived, you’re hungry, feeling sore or it is dark, cold and wet, takes a lot."
