Into the Catlins

After a little recovery after Challange Wanaka irondistance triathlon, I headed to Queenstown and further to Glenorchy to do some walking tracks. Not I should forget to  mention the stop at Fergburger in Queenstown itself. These guys make such incredibly good burgers (well, I can only tell from the SweetBambi, as this is the one I always go for) that people line up and wait up to one hour for their meal. 

But back to my storyline. Back in the lonely valley around Glenorchy and Kinloch, I went for a nice half-day walk up the Glacier burn track. It it quiet steep and leads through forest until it finally breaks through the tree line. After about 2h I stopped to have a break at a small stream with excellent view. A good day to start the tracking part of my journey. I thought.

Unfortunately my starter had nearly died in the meantime, so this being almost weekend it was hard to find a garage to check for this. Well, I got stuck in and around Queenstown for 4 days, which meant toggling between Fergsburger und trying to start my car. At least it started sometimes, so I could drive around a little bit. 400 NZD lost, but hey, I new starter is something...

Then the rain started. So where to go? I decided for Dunedin via Alexandra, only using free camping sites (need to "earn" the starter back). Basically this was the right decicion as I had stable weather and sunshine on almost every following afternoon. Spend my time with taking pictures and catching some sunshine.

Still trying to catch some views on the southern light (auora australis) I drove further south. But I completly forgot about the moon phase. Full moon is quite a pitty for that dude... At least I got some awesome sunrise in the Catlins (with heavy rain afterwards). 

Then it rained. And rained. And it rained again.

So I left the Catlins behind and set my next destination for NZ' deepest Lake. Lake Hauroko. As this is reached only after 20km of gravel road, I was quite lucky to find a free campsite with only 2 other campers. Fair deal.

What else to expect as I tried to get my dinner ready before being eaten alive by those nasty Sandflies. Well, I have to admit that this dinner was probably the best meal I have ever cooked by myself. And the blue cod at French pass already was delicious.

See for yourself: Venison medaillons with bacon-cranberry-broccoli. Yammi. 

The Challenge

And here I am again. Ready for Challenge Wanaka 2015. Even though it is European triathlon offseason I signed up for this event quite early. Training was actually going well until November when some strange knee pain started. Espacially the run training was cut down. After some checks, my doc gave a full-ok for any sports activities, I should just focus more on stretching. Well, thats what I did but the pain never really disappeared.

The Swim was actually fine, no wind, no waves and less than 300 starters on the full distance (3,8k swim, 180k bike, 42k run). I came out of the water after 67min and was happy that the temperature has risen to about 20 degrees (from 11 @ 5:00am). Sun was shining, weather was sweet as I made my way into Mt. Aspiring NP.

But soon, after 30k into the bike, me knee issues came up again. As there is actually nothing really damaged, I continued on a 30km/h+ average but this was suddenly cut down after I hit the 100k mark. For some reason I just couldn't push hard anymore, despite a very low average heart rate: 142bpm on the bike and 137pbm on the run. Something was wrong.

The run mad it even worse. I was terribly slow, but no issues on my endurance. I just couldn't run faster nor was I able to increase heart rate..

But, at least the finish ended with an awesome Selfie :-). However, this day was a struggle, a nightmare.. Judgement day. Thanks to Ines for supporting me with this GoPro-Selfie-Stick :-)

And all of it is on tape:

Challenge Wanaka 15 Finish-Selfie from Alex B on Vimeo.

Wild West

And there it was: Sunshine on NZ' Westcoast. A rare natural wonder. So the roadtrip continued to the city of Westport and further on north again to Karamea and the start of the Heapy track. The Heaphy track is one of NZ great walks, with its start and end about 600km per car apart.

I was quite happy with just a day trip on the coastal part of the track, but even with a good weather forecast and probably sunshine in whole NZ, we experienced "some" rain.

The rest of the West was actually really nice, except for a shitload of sandflies nearly everywhere. Those bastards bite without warning...

Here we have a Westcoast's traffic jam:

Dogs driving cars:

The famous pancake rocks (thousands of tourists included):

Evolutional education in Hokitika:

Well, creepy art:

The Franz Josef and Fox glacier:

The blue pools on the Haast Highway.. (again, thousands of tourists)

Goin' south

Just a week after I arrived in Auckland I stopped over in Wellington to meet some Kiwis and to pick up my former university mate Ines for a ferry ride over the Cook strait.

But not before I had a morning run at Cape palliser to a seal colony and a fresh recover bath in the sea.

First stop was French Pass where fresh blue cod were caught and fresh cooked to perfection. What an awesome meal...

Further on down the road lies Nelson Lakes National Park with two quite big lakes. Ideal for training, a wild mix of cross running and open water swimming was part of the game :-)

But the most amazing vies are right above, the nightskies are the most awesome I have ever seen:

IronKiwi is back in town

It’s good to be back - back to Kiwi Country. Two years have passed since I left New Zealand to finish my studies back home. 

After an 11h flight to Narita, Japan, I was very pleased to meet Yusuke at the Airport where we directly started for a one day trip to Tokyo.  I first met Yusuke at Challenge Wanaka 2013 where we both competed and stayed at the same B&B. Very happy to have a local guide, my main intention was to try the original, the native kind of sushi. And that’s what I got.  Salmon, Tuna? Hah, I got whale, Fugu eggs and all different kind of seafood I didn’t even know that it exists. Yammi and thanky you for this experience, adigato Yusuke!

But all comes to an end, so I boarded Air New Zealand flight to Auckland. 10 long hours of economy, with a blue screen on my entertainment system really made my day.  With the feeling of fully “wasteness” I arrived AKL early in the morning. Straight on to Takanini where I picked up my Camper van again, as I did in 2012. This time, I got a Nissan with a mileage of 266K and LPG. So a basically drive green :-)

After assembling my bike and packing everything into the van, I took a good sleep before a short trip to Auckland city and it’s Skytower with Varun, who I know from studying at Unitec. After refreshing some memories I hit the road and continued to Lake Taupo where I planned to stay two nights. 

Taupo welcomed me with sunshine, but strong winds. So with my first run and bike training on the Ironman NZ course turned out to be quite exhausting. Nevertheless, I felt quite happy not to have applied for that race, as the overall course “beauty” stand in no comparison to the South Island., where Challenge Wanaka 2015 takes place in 2 more weeks. As it seems that again I am the only Austrian competing, I should deliver at least some IMprovement.

However, after only 2,5h of cycling I directly went for a swim to have at least some kind of training ;-)

Next stop on my trip to the south was Whakapapa, which is in the Tongariro National Park, part of the volcanic plateau that’s hosts 3 more or less active volcanoes.  My plan was to hike the summit of Mt. Tangariro in the night to watch the sunrise and to avoid the crowd who was most likely to arise on the long Whaitangi weekend. 

So I started at 2:30am under clear skies and moonlight on the track to the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. As the first “shuttle” wouldn’t leave before 0530am, I had to walk for 2hours to reached the actual start of the track. It was cold, freezing and windy, so it took 4 layers to keep me warm. Shortly before 0600am I stood at the top of the mountain, no one around, the wind was gone and the sun appeared on the horizon. Incredibly beautiful! I felt like the king of the mountain. It was so quiet.

Well aware of the fact, that on this day more or less some thousand (!) people were expected on this track, I started my descent. I hardly made progress on the lower parts, passed queues 100m long before the only toilet hut and questioned the whole mountaineering community… Too many, bad equipped and bad prepared tourists… Puu, I was happy and excausted to be back in Whakapapa after 9h of “speed hiking”. This not being enough, I extended this littler trip by another 2h to make some pictures of Taranaki falls, what I think, made sense..

Everything hurt after this day. I promised to never put on my hiking shoes again… Bullshit. Next day I only wanted to drink a coffee on the Ruhapeu skifield (which is one of the 3 vulanoes), but it ended up in a 2h walk up to the summit, where I relaxed a little bit while thinking about the meaning of life :-)

Lesson learned: SPF75 is a good choice for NZ sun.. :-)

Remembering Kona

Almost 1 year has passed. But the sense of the one and only race in triathlon is still present. Now, roughly 4,5month before my next challenge I wonder if I can qualify one day.