Oxfam 100km Challenge - The wrap up

Team Go Run Girls, Jeanine, Maree, Katrina and Laurie set out on the 20th of March to conquer the ever amazing, Oxfam Trailwalker 100km Challenge. Raising money to help end global poverty. With all the teams combined this event raised over $1.14 million dollars toward this goal. An incredible united effort. 

Below is the Team's race summary written by member Jeanine and recap from what was a challenging but enjoyable weekend. 

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This whole adventure started with a chat in our Go Run Girls group about the Oxfam Trail events and how fantastic they were. Raising money for such a good cause as well as pushing ourselves to complete an 100km goal.

Next thing we new Maree owner and head coach at Go Run Girls was asking Katrina, Laurie and myself to join her on the 100km adventure around Taranaki. We set about asking our friends and family to help us as support crew, which you need in this event as they do not have any aid stations. Laurie and Jeanine's husbands took on this role as our pit crew at check points along with Jeanine's daughter's and Maree's daughter.

We have all done ultras before so knew what was ahead of us but hadn't worked in a team setting  together before. To get prepared we had Zoom meetings due to all of us living in different areas of the North Island. We also kept up our Facebook chat to organise how we would work together, what we would need in aid stations, what where our strengths and weaknesses and how we could all best support each other.

Thank goodness we had those discussions! We would later on find out one of the team members would need a lot of support so this chat had come in super handy. We went into the event all ready to work together, help each other and of course have lot's of fun! 

The one thing we didn't need to have a chat about was what tights we would wear as we are all Zeenya colour addicts so the hardest part there was choosing a print. As you can see, we went for a half and half team colour range. 

The night before the event the excitement built as we had dinner with our support crew and the Buff team. Team Buff went onto win the event that Maree's husband Stefan was part of. We did our final prep of checking over maps, talked about any extras we needed to buy and discussed the plan to our support crew about check points and what we'd like ready for us when we got to them. There was such a buzz between us all that the day was upon us and gratefully Covid-19 lockdowns hadn't got in our way like it had sadly with many other events. 

The morning of the event we checked in and then went for many, many nervous toilet stops before the 6am startline. When we started off we may of got a little lost for a few kilometers along with some other teams. I must admit we were super thankful once we got back on the course again and after that we kept a closer eye on the markers and the map we had been given. Our wonderful Kat had printed out a larger map so she lead the way with directions with great skill and many laughs as we did get confused many times in which way to go.

We were steady with our pace of power walking and jogging all the while having lots of fun and laughs. Check points went smoothly with Geoff and Chris having everything we needed ready for us in our own containers so it was easy to find. They even made trips to get us burgers and then later on as it grew colder, hot chips.