Through all kinds of weather, what if the skies may fall, just as long as we’re together ….

The great thing about doing the first leg in a relay is that you get to sit back afterwards and observe everyone else suffer. Now please note! I did not say ‘enjoy everyone else suffer’.

The tough thing about the first leg is that this is the leg most like a race. This is quite unlike the last leg where the field is maximally spread out.

Enough already ….. Let’s cut to the quick. The Calliope men’s team won the men's race walk section of the K•SWISS Rotorua Ekiden on Saturday. The Calliope women's team was second in their section.

The results for the Calliope men.

Conditions were somewhat less than clement. Yours truly was lucky. He had the wind in his sails for a good part of the first lap. Alas, other team members had to engage a barkingly cold, snarling wind head-on as they slowly, grimacingly, lap-by-aching-lap circuited Lake Rotorua. (Wew! You might need to read that again! And feel the pain this time!)

Having established a 3 min 30 seconds lead on the next team in the first lap, I had to sit in the van and watch with all the empathy I could muster, the quiet, lonely, inexorable suffering of my team mates.

It would have brought me to tears, had I been one given to flights of emotion.

Later that evening, much of the suffering was assuaged with assorted beverages which supplied a strange, calm, healing effect.

Meanwhile, down in Christchurch, another Calliope team did gladiatorial battle in the Takahe-Akaroa relay.

Conditions in this more southerly relay were, I am told, “atrocious” and that many of the team barely survived. They underwent environmental factors that would literally freeze the brass off a bald-headed monkey (or something of the sort).

How can one club endure so much suffering you ask?

I am afraid, I have no simple answer. I suspect senile dementia comes closest to the truth.

Regrettably, this team came away with no prize except their self respect intact. They also have the sure and certain knowledge that running up hill causes immediate pain, and running downhill causes a delayed agony.





By the way, if you feel you would like to run or walk with Calliope, then join us at our clubrooms: Osborne Memorial Park, Mahara Ave, Birkenhead.
Wednesday nights, 6:30.

In your running or walking, you will no longer suffer alone! (However, you may still be barmy!)