Two Queenstowners who completed an ironman-distance challenge last Saturday want to encourage locals who’d also like to tackle one.

Both ‘ironman’ novices, ultrarunner/marathoner Chris Harding, 39, and marathoner Alex Charlick, 33, swam 3.8km in Frankton Arm then cycled 180km and ran a 42.2km marathon around the Whakatipu Basin.

“There’s so many extreme sportsmen and women in Queenstown, and the fact we haven’t got an ironman or something similar is pretty crazy,” Harding says.

“If you train and plan and have that support network we had, you can complete it.”

He’d like to see a local ironman-distance challenge every six months — the next is in late March — and a group who’d train together for it.

To avoid copyright problems, he’s named his challenge FeMALES — ‘fe’ being the chemical symbol for iron.

Harding says his motivation for last Saturday was to complete an ironman-distance event before he turns 40 late this month.

That, of course, came with the fickleness of September weather — while the swim leg was in glassy water, he and Charlick were pelted with torrential rain for two hours while cycling.

“We were soaked to the bone.”

He says a local event also suits those put off by the exorbitant cost of travelling to the Taupō ironman, for example.

“The whole [Taupō] weekend would probably be up to $3000 or $4000.

“And we were like, ‘why do we have to spend that sort of money?’”

Harding and Charlick says their support crew of about 15 were awesome.

In ‘moving’ time, the former finished just under 14 hours and the latter just over that, “but it wasn’t about getting the time”, Harding says.

Anyone keen to join a training group can email him, cjharding@live.co.uk

— PHILIP CHANDLER