Dressing room
After winning one of the toughest races in the world, Kiwi trail running queen Ruth Croft reveals what helps her stay on her feet: the joy of being able to run.
Just before Ruth Croft began a 17-hour, 161 km pilgrimage on foot through the blistering California heat, two messages from home reminded her why she was doing this a second time.
The reports came the day before the Western States Endurance Run — a race dubbed one of the “undisputed crown jewels of human endurance” — of Kerry Suter and his partner, Ali Pottinger, in Rotorua.
Suter, a champion ultra-marathon runner and coach, is undergoing a long and painful rehabilitation from a mountain bike accident in February that left him paralyzed. He has been told not to expect to be able to walk again.
“I was very grateful that they both put their hands together,” Croft, the trail running phenom on the west coast, told the Dirt Church Radio podcast† “It was just a good reminder to get out there and make the most of my ability to do what I can do.
“What they’ve been through and are still going through is huge. So part of it was to get out there and make the most of that opportunity.
“To really have the body and the ability to run 100 miles is pretty insane.”
Croft has no qualms about her sport being seen as crazy; she says it herself.
“I think it’s important to step back and say it’s pretty crazy what we’re doing, but amazing at the same time,” she says. “A lot of them don’t take it too seriously.”
That’s why Croft ran to the finish line of Western States two weeks ago — the first woman to cross the line, in the third fastest time in the race’s nearly 50-year history — chased by three men in blown-up dinosaur suits.
So she’ll soon be flying to Greenland to run 100 miles along the Arctic Circle route with friends, fighting off swarms of relentless mosquitoes. (That’s no deterrent if you’ve lived your entire life with sandflies on the West Coast).
And it’s also why Croft is always looking for the “fun element” in the thousands of hours of training high in the mountains and deep in canyons, and the grueling effort she puts in an ultra-distance race. Otherwise she might not do it anymore.
No matter what exotic corners of the world the trails lead her, Croft is happiest taking the trail home. Every summer in New Zealand, she and her French partner, Martin Gaffuri, return to the South Island, to her hometown of Stillwater and to Wānaka. It is, she says, the most important time of her year.
“When I’m abroad, I feel like I’m living in a bubble,” she says. “I sometimes feel very one-dimensional.
“Coming back to New Zealand and spending time with friends and family makes me feel more balanced as a person.”
New Zealand is beginning to understand what a global ultrarunning phenomenon Croft is. Last year, she made headlines by winning the 102-km Tarawera Ultra — best man or woman — and then finishing second in Western States in her first attempt to run 100 miles — or 161 km.
Now that she has overcome that huge challenge (no, she is not tempted by a third crack in Western States), she moves on to the next one. Croft has the UTMB (Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc) in her sights – a 171km overnight race through the Alps, crossing the borders of France, Italy and Switzerland and gaining about 10,000 meters of altitude.
She will not try this year’s edition, which takes place next month. Switching from the debilitating heat of the western states to the chilly highs of UTMB makes it nearly impossible to attempt 100 miles in a row, Croft says, so she’s looking forward to next year’s event.
But meanwhile, she’s signed up for this year’s CCC — the 100km “little sister of the UTMB” — during Europe’s famous week-long festival of trail running in late August. She won that race in 2015 — the year she really arrived on the international trail running scene.
Croft will train with her Adidas Terrex teammates for a month in Chamonix – at the foot of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps – and see how well she has recovered from her incredible performance in California.
For now she is enjoying the sun in Mexico and learning to surf; just turn off the running.
It was a good time, she says, to step back and realize the tremendous efforts of her crew and family on that race day two weeks ago.
Her mother, father and aunt at the Western States start line in Olympic Valley and finish in Auburn, a small town in the heart of California’s historic gold rush country, made a world of difference for Croft this year.
‘I was so grateful they came by; they don’t often see me racing,” she says.
Although Croft’s father, Frank, is one of her biggest fans, he had no idea of the sheer size of the race: “I think he thought it was more like a 5km turkey run.”
Her family followed Croft and drove between the 16 aid stations of the race with Gaffuri at the wheel.
‘My father doesn’t know much about trail running, except that you have to take salt tablets. He panicked a little when he saw only one salt tablet in my ziplock bag for one aid station,” Croft laughs. “Martin had to put him in his place.”
Her race team — Gaffuri and Americans Alex Varner and David Thompson — also led her through the western states last year. (Then they came up with the idea of dressing like dinosaurs if she won this year’s race). Croft calls them “absolute rock stars.”
“Especially Martin,” she says. “He mans me for the day, but it’s also the days leading up to the race that he helps. And I’m obviously a bad excuse for a human after the race, so if the crew stops, it’s not over for him.
“He has also given me much more sense in my running. I’m doing it for myself, but knowing he’s there and how invested he is in it gives me more purpose.”
As the heat in the canyons reached nearly 40 degrees Celsius, Croft’s crew made sure she had enough ice in her neck bandana, arm sleeves and backpack to cool her spinal cord, her arm sleeves and neck when she left an aid station.
Varner ran 12 miles alongside her as a pacer during the race, keeping her busy talking about his dating life and vasectomies, Croft says. She later found that the stretch from Foresthill—at the race’s 100k mark—to crossing the American River at Rucky Chucky was the fastest a woman has run in racing history.
“He must have had some pretty good conversations to get me that fast,” Croft says.
When she started her second attempt in Western States, she didn’t want to think about what time she might do it.
“It can throw you off your race,” she says. She learned a lesson earlier this year when she unsuccessfully attempted to break the race record in the 60km Kepler Challenge at Te Anau. “I couldn’t get into a good rhythm, I always looked at my watch. It was really stressful and I didn’t enjoy it,” she says.
“In Western States you have to get out on the track, run your own race and not get caught up in what someone else is doing.”
It worked. Her time of 17h 21m 30s was 12 minutes faster than the time she set in 2021. And this time, she finished 25 minutes ahead of her closest rival.
It was a great achievement given Croft’s difficult build-up to the race – she injured her Achilles eight weeks before the start, then suffered two ankle sprains and spent two days in bed with Covid.
Her coach, Jonathan Wyatt, the mountain running legend of Kiwi, said she shouldn’t tell people she had the virus: “Because if you always tell people about it, it becomes something in your head,” explains Croft. “It’s a way to talk yourself out of the possibility of a good race.”
Croft has put a lot of work into her mental abilities this year, making her realize that what she does “should be fun.”
It’s a long way from her years at an American track and field fair, where running became something that was no longer fun. It was then that she moved to Taiwan to teach English, discovered trail running and became intrigued by a crazy race called Western States.
“It has taken a long time to get where I am with the sport,” she says. “But again, the bottom line is that we don’t take anything too seriously about it.”
* Dirt Church Radio is a trail running Kiwi podcast hosted by Eugene Bingham and Matt Rayment. More information on dirtchurchradio.com