Gutbuster

In a fit of apparent self-hatred about a month ago, I entered the Gutbuster race. It is a cross-country run around the Karori Sanctuary in Wellington, which as any local would know, is very hilly. It is 11.8km and 400m climb, which might not sound like much to you fitness bunnies out there, but was a reasonable challenge for me.

I did some appropriate preparation, including running the route a couple of weeks beforehand to ensure I wasn't going to collapse halfway in a wobbly pile of unfit jelly. I set myself a goal time of 45 minutes to the Meridian wind turbine and 1hr30 to finish. There was a prize for making the turbine in 35 minutes but prizes are for losers. Or rather, winners, but that's not very motivating. Besides, it was a hat and I don't need a hat.

Here's me at the start of the race:

Note how I'm speculatively looking off to the side to see if there's any way I can sneakily escape without anyone noticing.

From there on it was pretty hard work as my natural competitiveness argued with my lungs over whether I should run faster or slow down. Here's me about 20m from the finishing line:

I appear to be smiling. This was nothing to do with my state of enjoyment, but rather because I've just seen Mark, who came along to support me.

I made it to the wind turbine in 44:10 and finished in 1:20:54, with a (commendable, I think) placing of 28 out of 63 tough-as-nails ladies. And who knows, maybe next year I'll try for a free hat (but if I don't get one remember I said I didn't want one anyway).

The other weekend we headed north with Chris and his family to do the Tongariro Crossing. Unfortunately I didn't take very many good people shots, so you'll have to be content with scenery!

The Emerald Lakes

The scenery was spectacular and I can see why so many people do this walk. And lot of people do it - there were between 1000 and 1500 people on the day we walked. Although we started walking at 7 am, we were still in crowds most of the time. Sometimes there were big holdups on the track, other times you'd stop to take a photo but would feel rushed because of all the people behind you.

The Blue Lake

There are several craters on the crossing; some with visible steam or a whiff of sulphur, others with gorgeous lakes in them. There were signs warning of what to do in the case of an eruption and there was evidence of lava flows about the place that were younger than most of the people walking the track.

The Red Crater (one of the sulphurous ones)

We stayed at a local motel/cabin/campground complex. Difficult tent peg terrain because the soils are so rocky in these parts! There were interesting hummocks all around, and we were informed by a member of the group that these are all from the debris piled up at the front of lahars. Very cool.

This is one of the residents of the campground. It was a bit grumpy on the Saturday night (and fun to wind up), but much more chilled on Sunday to the point of being a nuisance and getting into everything. It was quite happy to be handled and even started talking to us after a while. I was its best buddy after I turned over a few rocks to expose the critters underneath.

Sylv and I went for a run on Sunday. The first part was the hardest running, across a rock field and lava flows on the flanks of Mt Ruapehu.

The track settled down after a bit and we soon found ourselves running through tussockland and bush. This is Mt Ngauruhoe in the distance - the Tongariro Crossing goes through the low point you can see in the middle of the range. Apparently Mt Tongariro (to the left of Ngauruhoe) used to be bigger until it blew its top!

Our house is a very very very fine house

Last weekend we walked the Tongariro Crossing with Chris and others. But first, we thought it was high time we bombarded you with some mundane details of our lives in Wellington.

This is our flat (the white one with the grey roof). We have the top flat. As you can see, it's nearly surrounded by bush and sits above a fairly steep little gully. This means we get lots of tui and bellbirds shitting on our car. We've also had kaka overflying our house and squawking away, pretty cool! It gets sun most of the day, which is unusual in Wellington.

Things were a bit grim for a week or two when we first moved in. We even borrowed the mattress that you can see! Fortunately now we have a few more comforts, though we still need a vacuum cleaner. Guests, don't look too closely at the carpet.

All the drawers that you can see are representative of the rest of the house, ie. storage capacity bordering on ridiculous! But quite handy. You should see our toy cupboard...

The view from our street. I get a full view of the harbour from the top of our street as I begin my bike ride to work, very nice. Sylv doesn't get this, but does get a nice walk past the Botanic Gardens after she's slithered her way down the Military Track (down the aforementioned gully) past Julia's house.

This is the view from our bedroom window. Look at those suckers in the shade! Can you spot the ludicrously long cable car access lift?

For those who haven't caught up on our news, I've been working at CPG Ltd (an engineering consultancy) for about six weeks now, as a drainage engineer. Basically, dealing with a lot of poos and wees! Fun :-) Quite complex and tricky jobs now (though not so much from a design sense) and I've been thrown in at the deep end a bit with people leaving.

Sylv is working in the Research Data and Reporting team at the Ministry of Fisheries. She is a Senior Business Analyst, didn't you know! She's still finding out exactly what that means but is enjoying it so far. We'll see how much she enjoys it on Monday after doing a running race called the Gutbuster on Sunday.