Ultrarunner’s lucrative 25 seconds

A local ultrarunner who is used to running for hours surprised himself by taking out the inaugural Bayleys Brecon St Grunt charity event — racing up and down Queenstown’s Brecon St steps — in a record time of 25.68 seconds last Saturday.

Pocketing $1000 for his troubles, Welshman Hywel Dinnick beat local Englishman Josh King in the men’s final after a series of elimination head-to-head races.

"I think I’ll never make that hourly rate again, I think I’ll retire from here on in," he quips.

The 35-year-old, who’s lived in Queenstown for about 12 years, has twice won the 32km Routeburn Classic on the Routeburn Track, and in December 2019, to celebrate his 30th birthday, he completed the Kepler, Milford and Routeburn tracks within 24 hours.

"To do just a short 30 seconds up and down is a bit different from what I usually do, so I was expecting some young whippersnapper in their 20s to take it out," he says.

Having never trained for anything similar, Dinnick says the secret was "just taking it easy and more about, like, co-ordination and flow rather than, like, just all-out speed".

Dunedin’s Shayne Jagger, 32, visiting Queenstown with her husband to celebrate his birthday, took out the women’s event — also winning $1000 — by beating Hannah Wall in the final.

She set the women’s record of 31.03sec in her semi-final.

"I’ve never done any event like that before," she says, though for her 30th she did ‘climb’ 30,000 stairs on a gym stair machine.

After a foot injury in February, Jagger’s been on a prescribed return-to-run programme, "but this wasn’t on the programme".

As to the secret behind her success, "I think maybe a little bit of competitiveness just shone through".

She says she appreciated the rule that competitors had to land on every step.

"I was a bit worried about people bounding down the stairs and not having the same leg reach as some of them."

Winners of the mixed team event were local fireys Aoife Sheehan, Lee Winter and Aaron Murphy, competing as ‘Third Wheel’, whose winning time was 1:36.95sec — they also won $1000.

Other winners on the day were charities St John and local neurodiversity charity Pivotal Point who’ll both receive a few thousand dollars from the event.

Meanwhile, local athletics coach Neville Britton says the race — dreamt up by Mountain Scene chief news hound Philip ‘Scoop’ Chandler — has "really good, broad appeal".

"It does involve running, but I think the skills involve eye, foot coordination — the term for it is fast neuromusuclar activation, and that would work very well for footballers, hockey players and anybody that has to move their feet quickly for shorter periods of time.

"And by setting the rules at every step down, I think it avoided some broken ankles — while there were a few that landed on their butt cheeks, they were able to pop back up again.

"I think the event’s another one of those classic, unique things we can pin on Queenstown."