He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata he tangata he tangata!
What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people!
There are three things that we are BIG believers in and are our drivers behind the project.
The first is Community & Connection – that we are better together, in our challenges and our achievements. That the genuine support and connection, and the sharing of common interests, experiences and goals, lessens the feelings of loneliness and isolation, and ultimately creates happy healthier humans.
The second is Gratitude – that the practice of being present and celebrating the positive and wonderful things around us, no matter how small, can change your life. That we should never take for granted our life, our environment, our whenua, or our bodies and their ability to move.
And the third is prioritising our Mental Health & Wellbeing. In our experience, movement and running has had a huge and positive impact on our own overall physical and mental health. Running has helped us build mental fortitude, given us a deep feeling of personal accomplishment, allowed us to connect with inspiring people, and bought with it regular bouts of that ‘runners high’!
The RunnersNZ project backstory:
We started the RunnersNZ project 2019… almost unintentionally.
With a background in studio photography, I (Carly) had already created several personal series of portraits; photographing interesting individuals and sharing the dialogue of our deeply honest conversations. With each person I asked the simple question… WHY? What attracted them to their current vocation and how did they get to be where they are today. Having moved back to New Zealand and swapping out the studio for a motorhome, I tried to create a new portrait series that would be compatible with our transient life, living on the road with three young children (two on the Autism Spectrum). A couple of initial ideas flopped; all being in the vein of Brandon Stanton’s ‘Humans of New York’ (or HONY). Eventually, inspired by our own relatively new obsession with running and the amazing friendly people we were meeting at events, the RunnersNZ project and the theme of ‘Why I run’ emerged organically.
The scope was simple, unquestionably inclusive, and wildly diverse : All Runners. All Stories.
No matter a person’s journey, their distance, speed or ‘success’, if they had been running for 60+ years, or started last week; ran track, trail or road; fast, slow, or somewhere in between; if they run every day or run every so often, young or old… if they ran they qualified! And so connected, mostly online, before meeting each runner in person, taking their photograph and chatting candidly about their motivations to start running – and why they kept at it.
More than 200 runners later, with stories of every WHY imaginable, we are overwhelmingly grateful for and proud of the RunnersNZ community!
We are always excited and open to meeting new runners for a korero and a catchup.
Please SUBSCRIBE to our monthly newsletter, or follow RunnersNZ on Instagram to read where in New Zealand we are headed next. You are so welcome to send us DM or MESSAGE and we are always grateful for shares and tags on social media. We cannot wait to meet you!
Ngā mihi.
Carly & Lee
