Pirongia Munter 2023

 

Pirongia Munter 2023

18 November 2023

37.88km, 3284m, 9:59:56

https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/12774936238
https://www.strava.com/activities/10237609015/overview
https://www.racetime.co.nz/results/results-pirongia-trail-run-2023/

Build up

OMG, we had been dreading and fearing this run for months! (Ever since Barnaby signed up and forced us to sign up too)(Admittedly I also cop some serious blame for the initial idea...)

I 'd been doing a bunch of hard training, since we knew that even though this was 'only' 37km, the times were brutally slow. We had our previous experiences of the Grunter (and Greater Grunter, hehe hehe), in which 15km had taken us a nearly unbelievable 3 hours, so we knew it would be a long day out. We were estimating up to 8 hours duration. Surely it couldn't take longer than that!??

Race Day

I drove out with Barnaby and Neville. This involved a 3:30am wakeup! For some reason, Will had decided to prove that he was more sensible than us, by evading all of our bullying and avoiding the event sign-up process. He was sensible, yes, but was he brave like us???

I had been very worried for months that the Pirongia trails might be wet.

Yep. It was.

The rain started the day before, and basically didn't let-up for the entirety of our run. Only ever drizzle, but persistent enough to turn the trails into a muddy quagmire.

We got the (delayed) 6:00am bus from Te Pahu school up to the Pirongia Lodge, with plenty of time to get prepared and to receive our individual EPIRB transponders. This was less than confidence-inspiring, especially when we had our race briefing... The race director said "Oh, its raining. We are in the cloud. The rescue helicopters can't fly. This has rather severe consequences for anyone who gets injured. Please don't get injured." Oh well, at least with us each having an EPIRB, they would know where on the course we were stuck, injured, immobile, freezing and slowly starving to death.

We're off!

We started a bit late (7:20am), and the rain wasn't even too bad. Spirits were high.

We jogged and walked up the first long climb, enjoying the good track conditions (and knowing that wouldn't last).

Sure enough, our progress was soon slowed by the increasingly rough trail and increasing uphill slope.

There were also some downhill sections, so that we could have some more uphill.

After 2 hours of this, we got up to the summit of Pirongia, and climbed up the neat wooden construction to see the views. 

In case you missed the facetiousness above.... there were no views (all day) (except of each other).

We were all travelling along ok, with mostly Nev in the lead and me cruising along at the rear.

A short while after the summit we got to the Pahuatea Hut (920m elevation) for a quick water refill and some airplanes. It was somewhat windy at the top, and fairly cool.

After the hut, there were nice boardwalks for 500 meters, until the boardwalk lost its plastic grip, at which point the wooden boards had a coefficient of friction of about 0.001. But we avoided slipping off them, and then the boardwalks came to an end. 

We entered the (in)famous Bell Track. It was muddy. Very muddy.

And rooty. Very rooty.

And rainy. Very rainy.

And muddy. Very muddy.

Fortunately Barnaby and Nev were doing their best to entertain me by sinking and falling into the mud. Unfortunately little of this was captured on my phone camera due to the incessant rain. But this bit was :)

After some (long) time of this, the Bell Track started descending, at which point it turned from being a muddy path to being a muddy stream. Literally mud flowing down the trail. In places, you could have made a raft and paddled down the mud flow. We were trying to run, but often just stumbling, slowly descending through the tree roots and bogs.

I drew a small amount of blood, just to prove I was there.

At about the half way distance, the trail flattened out and improved. However the large number of fallen trees meant that path finding became a bit of a mission, and the number of supple jack vines multiplied into the millions. Barnaby called out 'heads' or 'feet' etc every several minutes as we dodged and stepped through the vines. The rain was a mere drizzle, and conditions for running actually quite pleasant.

Weirdly, we ended up running with a bunch of other people at this point (about 6 girls and a couple of guys), and they mostly did the path finding for us.

We eventually got to the second aid station (the Kaniwhaniwha Campsite) after 6 hours.  It seemed impossible that it could have taken us a full 6 hours to travel 23km. This was rather scary, since we had only done 2/3rds of the run, and the cut-off time was set by the organisers at 10.00 hours!

Nev did suggest (not at all jokingly) that we could pull out of the run at this point. It was a tempting thought...

 After a quick toily stop and a bottle of flat coke and vegemite and chip sandwich from my drop bag we carried on. I had contemplated changing shoes and socks, since I had expected to have macerated, waterlogged feet by this point. But my feet (in the excellent Salomon SpeedCross 6) were fortunately feeling fine. Yay! (Even by the end of the run they were not sore, nor blistered anywhere)

The trail headed up and up from here. We were jogging most bits, with power walking on the more uphill sections. We gained 800m over the next couple of hours, with me at the back somewhat slowing down Nev and Barnaby. I was feeling a bit nauseous (and very fatigued).

Nev moved ahead out of sight here, while Barney kindly kept with me.

Eventually we joined onto the (Grunter) trail that headed back down the hill towards the finish. This trail was super steep. Each slippery, wet, footstep involved clambering down very steep surfaces, trying not to fall headfirst down the hill. It was slow going. I twisted my right ankle painfully at one point, but it was not bad, and it didn't slow me down.

We descended forever, until we finally got to the last 3km, where the trail flattened off and was actually very runnable for a change. Barnaby and I kept discussing the 10 hour cutoff, since we were just on the borderline of failing to meet it! We fairly raced down the last few kilometers - or it at least felt like it. Unfortunately, later analysis would show we did over 8 minutes/km - omg so slow. (This was only fast in comparison to earlier uphill kilometer splits, the slowest of which was 26 minutes)

We got to the stream crossing at the bottom with about 4 minutes to go, and Barnaby took off at high speed up the last long uphill to try to avoid the time cutoff and the DNF that might entail. I gamely followed along, puffing harder than anytime all day, and we got to the finish line with 20 seconds to spare! Yay!

Nev beat us in by one minute or so.

Wrap

The overall takeaway here was our massively slow speed over the course. Of the 46 brave starters on the Munter option, we were finishers 30..32. Most of the women beat us, and all but 6 of the men. This was all rather bruising to our egos :)

I don't feel like we ran it too conservatively, but it was just very slow going when you are not willing to accept a high risk of injury.

Nev swilled some pickle juice through the run and is now a big fan of its anti-cramp properties. I never got cramp (except for some minor twinges), which was a surprise. Half a salt tablet at the campground might have helped us also.

Incredibly, the fastest runner came in just under 6 hours. That is quick!

It was bloody good fun (even in the rain), but I doubt we will do it again!