“I was always a sporty kid, but man, did I hate running. While I played cricket and netball to competitive levels, I was always managing to come up with an excuse to avoid running – be it faking an injury before cross country at school or ‘forgetting’ my bat in the car when the team was off to run around the field as a warmup. I just wasn’t very good at it. I was never fast, and it was never enjoyable.
So how did I go from that kid to completing ultras? Great question, because one day eleven years ago I thought – for no good, inspirational reason – ‘I wonder how far I could run’. And so I laced up my gym shoes and went for a 4km run on the Pipeline Track in West Auckland. It felt fine. It actually felt quite fun. So I thought, you know what, this seems okay. The next day I ran 5k. A few days later I ran 10k. (Kids, don’t try this at home: this is a terribly unsafe way to take up running!) After doing that five days a week for a month or so, I realised I was hooked.
It took me a while before I entered races, and when I did, I was a solid back of the packer – hard on the wee competitive spirit that lives within me. But the thing about ultras and mountain running is that it quickly became apparent that it genuinely didn’t matter where in the field you were. We were all out there covering the same terrain, undertaking the same challenge – some of us just got to be back home having a beer, shower and nap earlier than others. I racked up seven Keplers, five Routeburns, among a bunch of other races. But I still didn’t come across that elusive ‘why’ – I was really just running for the sake of running for the longest time. I don’t even know that I was necessarily enjoying myself. I put too much pressure on myself for races and results, and I was often disappointed.
And then things started going wrong. My running progress not only went downhill, it went backwards. I started doing very badly in races; I stopped enjoying training altogether. It all felt like a miserable slog and I came very close to giving it all up entirely. I still loved all the people I met through running, but sometimes it’s tough when you can’t even go for a group run with mates because your best is a couple of minutes a kilometre slower than their worst. I had my first ever DNF and injury at Tarawera in 2021, I withdrew from the community, I decided to give up on the whole running thing. That declaration lasted quite some time. But then I decided enough was enough, to take responsibility for my own downturn in fitness, performance and happiness, and to turn it around.
In the past year amongst a bunch of adversity I’ve totally refreshed my love affair with running. My strength training coach Don Saladino likes to say that fitness is like a tow rope that can pull you through tough times in your life, and as I started to have a disproportionate amount of those tough times in my life I renewed my focus on my health and fitness; I started to turn unexpected events into opportunities to improve my resilience. I made fitness my tow rope. I started to build a stronger, tougher body to support my running, and I found a fitness family to support my mental health. I found my why: I run because I’m privileged enough to be able to, because I’m an extraordinarily ordinary athlete and I can show others that you don’t have to be naturally talented for hard work to pay off, and once again now I run just because I love it. Because I’m proud of what I can do, and because more than anything in this world, I love to be out in the mountains with my four legged best friend Loki. Running and fitness got me through the toughest two years of my life. One of my dear friends loves to say that you get knocked down seven times, and you get up eight. And so that’s what running will always be for me: the eighth time I get up off the ground again.
Who could have known that would come from a spur of the moment 4km in 2012? It just goes to show: sometimes the most important things in your life are the things you least expect!”
Fleur @fleurdouglasnz
(Kingston)
Photo taken in Te Anau
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