Racing
blogposts
No Pain, No Rogaine
It’s 10pm and the drizzle has switched up a notch to steady rain. “In fairness,” chirps Dani a couple of metres ahead of me as we scramble through the thick Old Man’s Broom, “at least we’re not in that prickly Matagouri.” Agreed. We have named ourselves team Around...
A few ultra yards in the backyard. Marlborough, NZ.
April 25th, 2020. Embracing the hurt box - A special kind of special. It’s weird. As you’re being sucked into its void, you already know that when you are eventually spat out on the other side you’re going to be in a thousand pieces. Welcome to The Hurt Box. The crazy...
Taupo Ultra Marathon. New Zealand.
November 2017 - “Running is nothing more than a series of arguments between the part of your brain that wants to stop, and the part that wants to keep going.” So Taupo Ultra Marathon was pretty much one massive argument, for 11hrs20mins, over 74km of trails, road, and...
Training places worth remembering. New Zealand.
TIMELESS - Training is more often than not about putting your head down, your feet to the metal, and well... training. But on those less intense days, it’s important to look around, smell the air, remember you’re one lucky person, and take the odd snap. The back...
Sky Run Zimbabwe
December 2019 - Sky high in Zimbabwe Amongst Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highland wilderness last weekend, a few dozen runners gathered for Sky Run Zimbabwe. Taking place in the Nyanga National Park, amongst the thick mist and mention of the six inches of rain that had been...
Kinetic Events/A2A 25km Adventure Race. Gauteng, South Africa.
November 2019 - MAPPING OUT A SMILE –What this sport comes down to, is great people. And when two superior Adventure Racing combos like Addicted2Adventure and Kinetic Events combine forces, you know it will be there ten fold. Sunday’s Expedition Africa 25km Sprint...
Boxing Diaries: Fight For Life. Marlborough. NEW ZEALAND
September 2018 - Okay so technically this isnt' a 'race' as such, but a nice break from racing, and the learnings taken from this journey were just as immense. Fight For Life. Corporate Boxing Competition. Marlborough region, South Island, New Zealand. The...
Comrades Marathon. KZN, South Africa.
June 10, 2019. The Comrades Marathon is coined the Ultimate Human Race. For perfect reason. An 89 kilometre hilly run, striding through the Valley of a Thousand Hills in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Every step of the way boasts the power of the human spirit at its...
Skukuza Half Marathon. Kruger National Park, South Africa.
August 4, 2019. A SMALL STORY ABOUT A BIG PLACE Sweeet…. Only 6km to go. Oh no, wait. That’s not the 15km marker, it’s elephant poo. That pretty much sums up a running race in the Kruger National Park. Skukuza Half Marathon. The start gun, (actually the roar of a...
Kruger 2 Canyon. South Africa
July 7, 2019. Another nugget of gold for the South Africa adventure memory bank with some awesome trail running buddies- what a great crew. 🥰 My first stage trail running race. The Kruger2Canyon Challenge 2019 , where the highveld meets the lowveld, on the Limpopo...
Kalahari Augrabies Extreme Marathon. South Africa.
October 23, 2019. We put our worlds on hold for a week, and took off on foot into a world of sand and rocks and rivers, canvas and fire, dirt, Weather Gods, stars and scorching sun. As the days ticked by a new reality was weaved; one of footprints, friendships,...
Num Num Trail. South Africa.
July 28, 2019. Trail runners pack lots into a day when they’re in their happy place of the mountains. So running the five-day Num Num Hiking Trail, in one day, makes perfect sense. Num Num is the onomatopoeia for ‘yum yum’ fruit. But no time to embrace this when...
Tierpoort Trail Adventure. Gauteng, South Africa.
TIERPOORT ADVENTURE FARM May 7, 2019. A lekker morning for a 21km Sunday morning trail run. Up koppie, down koppie. But you know it’s been a less than perfectly ideal race when you hear this at the prize giving; “She had about 5 falls, 6 swims, got lost, is a little...
Wolf Pack Run. Gauteng, South Africa.
April 1, 2019. The Wolf Pack Hell Run... ‘Join the underground secret society of likeminded masochistic mountain runners known as The “Wolf Pack,” was the invitation. The eager kiwi Annabelle Latz, signed up. Five tough scrambles up a very steep rocky and dusty trail,...
Trail running Island style. Rodrigues.
September 8, 2019. New word: Rumming. Definition: Slamming out a 19km trail running race in Rodrigues, the morning after you’ve given the Mauritian rums a very good nudge at the Expedition Africa after party. A bit tricky to talk and think in French with one of the...
SkyRun Training Camp. South Africa.
16 September, 2019. At a training camp for a race called Sky Run, we’re made aware of two facts pretty early on in the piece. One being, that for the next 100km, all the peaks and ridge lines in our sight are there at that particular time for one sole purpose – to run...
Sky Run South Africa.
#hellofarun 19 November, 2019. It’s called Sky Run. And they’re not joking. Sky Run South Africa actually started off as a two day Sky Walk in the early nineties, then some nutty buggers decided that it needed to be turned up a notch. Crank the clock forward to 1997,...
published articles
Running on a moonscape. Botswana
Trail Run Magazine, (AUS/NZ.), July 2020.Written by Annabelle Latz. Photos by Xavier Briel. Nothing could prepare me for it, and nothing will ever compare to it. Running on a white vastness, a cloud-whispered light-blue sky above, amongst an absence of landmarks and...
Sky Run Zimbabwe
Country Wide magazine, June 2020. New Zealand.
A few ultra yards in the backyard. Marlborough, NZ.
April 25th, 2020. Embracing the hurt box - A special kind of special. It’s weird. As you’re being sucked into its void, you already know that when you are eventually spat out on the other side you’re going to be in a thousand pieces. Welcome to The Hurt Box. The crazy...
Running Sky High – Sky Run 100k
Country Wide Magazine, February 2020. Check out the online magazine and full version including the article with Graham and Margy Frost of the wonderful haven of Balloch, click here
Running with the Desert Gods, Kalahari Desert. AFRICA
www.holliewoodhouse.com, February 2020. Running across the Kalahari Desert for 250km requires a lot of hard work from the top two inches. And some solid graft from the legs too. Signing up for the Kalahari Augrabies Extreme Marathon gave me the chance to experience...
Salt Pans Ultra – Botswana’s inaugural stage ultra marathon race. BOTSWANA
Peolwane Media, Air Botswana inflight magazine. November 2019.
Spring Challenge – Adventure Racing. NEW ZEALAND
Say Yes To Adventure Magazine. March, 2016.