Surprising even himself, the broadcaster embarked on a marathon mission. Photo / Robert Trathen, photos4sale ltd
Some men decide to buy a sports car, vigorously grow facial hair or spend hundreds of dollars on a pair of sneakers they used to covet in their (vanishing) youth.
But Fair Go presenter Hadyn Jones tackled his mid-life crisis a different way, by signing up to run 60 kilometres around rugged mountains in Fiordland National Park.
His friends thought he had gone insane.
And with walking the family dog and lugging his camera gear to filming locations appearing to be the 47-year-old’s only exercise, he admits doing an ultramarathon was either “superb confidence or utter foolishness”.
“I became invigorated by the challenge because I didn’t know if I could do it and my window for this sort of malarkey was starting to close,” tells Jones, who hosts Good Sorts, a weekly yarn that airs at the end of the Sunday 1 News bulletin and celebrates ordinary Kiwis doing something extraordinary.
It was last May, while out filming a Good Sort story about a DoC ranger on the Routeburn Track, that the seed was planted for Jones’ rebirth as a mid-life runner.
“We had to walk three hours to the first hut,” he recalls. “So we had all this time to chat and examine one’s life, and the ranger was telling me about how he had run the Kepler Challenge.
“It sounded ridiculous. He told me about spending his whole weekend training and I thought, ‘Well, that’d never go down well in the Jones family.’ It sounded so unattainable in my life stage.”
Jones reckons Facebook must have been listening to that conversation in the bush.
“Because somehow, when I got back, the Kepler Challenge had slipped onto my social media feed. I pressed the ‘interested’ button and then my mother rang 45 seconds later – because she has a PhD in Facebook – and said, ‘Are you doing Kepler?’
“I told her a lie because I wasn’t ready to face up to the idea of doing it and replied, ‘No, that’s a preposterous idea.’ Usually, online entries are sold out in four minutes, but I wasn’t even committed enough to get up at 6am on a Saturday to get an entry.”
Facebook, however, kept reminding Jones what he was missing out on. And if he was really honest with himself, he knew deep down that he needed to do something like this to improve his health and wellbeing.
“I’m on the road for my job a lot,” says the roving reporter, who commutes from his home in New Plymouth to Auckland each week to film Fair Go. “Over 150 flights a year and sleeping in hotel rooms, which may sound exotic, but it also means it’s quite a sedentary life.
“So I emailed the race organisers, who said I could do a charity entry. I didn’t tell my wife Zanta that I paid a thousand dollars and the money goes to a Te Anau charity. But it gave me a spot in the race.”
Taking up running wasn’t such a leap into the unknown for Jones, who had completed a marathon 20 years ago.
The father- of-three started by training alone at night, working up to 5km, then 6km, then 10km around local streets before running up Mount Taranaki to build his endurance.
“My wife said to me, ‘I don’t know what has happened to you, but don’t stop running,’” he grins.
“I would sprint down Fitzroy Beach, near where I live, just giddy with happiness. There must be some sort of chemical release. I was expecting to be sore, but I was just delighted. Life was never rosier.”
Five months later, Jones was ready to take on the 50km Taupō ultramarathon as the precursor to the Kepler Challenge.
“It’s funny – I did Seven Sharp with Hilary Barry on the Friday night beforehand and she was like, ‘Oh, good luck, you’re going to need some pasta for carb loading!’ So we spent the ad breaks looking up Italian restaurants on my drive down from Auckland to Taupō after the show finished.”
In December, when the time came for the Kepler Challenge, his childhood best friend Nick from Invercargill drove up to support him and ended up being the one to successfully get an excited Jones over the start line.
“I’m quite forgetful,” reveals the amiable broadcaster. “So I had put all my gear on, pinned my race number on, got some food, filled my water bottle – I thought I was good to go. Then I’m walking towards the start line, and I look at a guy in front of me and think, ‘Oh, that’s funny, he’s wearing a home detention ankle bracelet.’
“It was, of course, a transponder that you need to start the race with. So Nick quickly drove back to pick mine up and I started with one minute to spare!”
For the first five hours of his epic alpine adventure, Jones found it fun. After that, not so much.
“The first 30 kilometres are in the mountains – it’s how I imagine the Norwegian fjords to look. It’s just stunning scenery. I chatted with everyone who I passed, probably a bit like speed dating, where you discuss everything from childbirth to what song played at your wedding.
“And if I chat, I distract myself from the fact I could possibly be running. So I was on a high and delirious for about five hours, and then it got more and more painful,” he shares.
“With about 10 kilometres to go, my mum Glenyss was there to cheer me on and gave me my old pair of running shoes, which was like putting on a pair of slippers. I also skulled a bottle of fizzy cola, not flat cola, which I instantly regretted because I had stomach cramps about a kilometre later.
“It wasn’t easy,” concedes Jones, who scuttled through the finish line with a time of eight hours and one minute.
“I remember thinking, ‘Anytime someone suggests something interesting, don’t click ‘interested’ on Facebook ever again!’ Now that a few months have passed, I can look back on it fondly.”
When asked what went through his mind during his ultramarathon, Jones pauses thoughtfully before answering that it was, “Oh, I wish Dad was here”, or, “Dad would have found this hilarious.”
Marathon runner Murray Jones died when Hadyn – the youngest of three kids – was only 5 and the family had just moved to Gore. Tragically, he was hit by a car while out running with two friends.
“A car with only one headlight came down a gravel road,” tells Jones. “They thought it was a motorbike and moved out on to the road a little. Two of them were killed. One of them was my dad. He was in hospital for 10 days before he died, so we got to say goodbye to him. It’s a long time ago now and hard to remember, but the pain never goes away … it just subsides and comes back in different forms.”
Adds Jones, “I don’t know if it’s a conscious or an unconscious thing, but I normally don’t run on the road that much.
“Once I did an around-the-mountain relay in New Plymouth, which started during the night. I began running at 4am and I thought they were going to hand me a big light, but it was just a little bike light.
“Then I was running by myself for two and a half hours in the dark and I really felt Dad then. Trucks whizzed past me and it didn’t feel good at all.”
Jones says that growing up without a father was not fun.
“Actually, that’s an understatement – it’s horrendous. When I was younger, I really did want a dad. I would blow my birthday candles out to make a wish and whisper ‘a dad’. I know you’re not supposed to say what you wished for. I was always sizing up replacements and thought my football coach could be my dad. It was quite a practical thing – I’d lost a dad, so I really needed another one.”
Before he died, Murray and Glenyss set up Athletics Gore. Born deaf, Glenyss found it difficult to play team sports, so taking up athletics at school provided her with an opportunity to learn and love a sport.
“Tuesday night was athletics night in our family and then events held on Saturday,” shares Jones. “However, I was more interested in going around collecting up all the bottles because if you handed in a bottle, you got money for lollies back then.
“Plus, I was always annoyed at these athletic events because they’d have the 4x100m family relay. But there were five of us, so I was always sat out. I guess running found me again.”
After Murray’s death, Hadyn says his mum went running to cope with her grief. Now a sprightly 80-year-old, Glenyss still runs but embarks on shorter distances these days.
“She delights in going to the Masters Games and entering the women’s 100-metre sprint. It’s a pretty small field of athletes in the over-80s age grade, so she does pretty well,” he quips.
Now that he is a father to Marley, 13, Archer, 11, and Perry, 9, Jones goes to great lengths to be the best dad he can be. When he chats to the Woman’s Weekly, Jones has just returned from five days at school camp – and dominating the water slide – with son Archer’s Year 7 intermediate class.
Jones says his kids haven’t been quite as keen to join him on long runs, but are always up for finishing a run event with him.
“They’re little show-offs who like running down the finish chute with everyone clapping. It’s their speciality. And my son is pretty proud that he’s beaten me in two sprints down a chute.”
So what’s Jones’ next challenge?
“I told my family I’d stop running for a while,” says Jones, laughing. “But unfortunately, I had a look on the internet and there’s a 60km race around the hills in Wellington in July. That doesn’t sound appealing, does it?! But there’s lots of little places where the kids could run with me for two or three kilometres. And just like their dad, they’re really just there for the lollies at the aid stations.”
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