Glenn Sutton tamed Death Valley.
Now, he wants to go back and give it a second hammering.
Sutton, a Dunedin runner, competed in the gruelling Badwater 217km race in Death Valley in California in July this year.
He finished in a shade over 36 and a-half hours, not a bad effort considering he had come from the depths of a Dunedin winter.
He has the itch to go back again.
''I want to go back and give it another go. Whether I do or not will come down to money, really. I would not like to think about how much it cost me,'' Sutton said.
''But it was worth every penny. Not just because of the running and the race, but the people you meet and all sorts of different things.
''Whether I do go back depends on my family, too. They made some huge sacrifices to allow me to go there.''
Wife Julia and children Emily (12), Ruby (9) and Lucy (6) watched the race on the internet back home in Dunedin.
Sutton still has the ''heat box'' in his house in which he trained to acclimatise to the hot Californian sun.
He built the box in his garage, put a heater inside it to crank the temperature up to 40degC-plus, and then trained on a treadmill in the months leading up to the race.
He estimated it cost about $15,000 for him to get to California and compete.
Sutton (40) had to put up with temperatures of more than 40degC in the race but he was always confident he would finish.
''It was definitely the toughest thing I've ever done. A lot of people have different definitions of what is tough, I suppose.
"The heat was the factor. I had not experienced anything like that before.''
He said the hardest thing about the race was he did not know what to expect, as he was a first-time competitor.
That would make the next race a whole lot easier.
''But I couldn't have done it without the team I had with me. Just the involvement of those three guys made it real fun. They were real valuable people.''
He spent a couple of days in Las Vegas on the way home but said he ''could not wait to get out of the place''.
He had a minor knee problem after the race but it was now fine.
Six weeks after Badwater, he ran in the Naseby 100 mile event, where he was running in snow.
''It was a lot colder, obviously. It was completely different running. A lot flatter and you knew what to expect.''
Since then, he has done the Dunedin and Invercargill marathons and he finished the year with the Kepler Challenge earlier this month.
All up, he covered 755km in the seven events he entered this year.
That is on top of the endless other kilometres he had covered in training.
''Prior to Badwater, I was running 100km and more every week. I'm not getting sick of running. It's a phase I'm going through. But I'm still enjoying it.''
